Addressing employee turnover in retail through CSR and transformational leadership

Abstract

Purpose Employee turnover, a reality that Indian retail organizations cannot ignore, is the central theme of this paper. The authors have aimed to empirically establish corporate social responsibility initiatives (CSRI) and transformational leadership (TL) as rather unconventional predictors that can potentially influence retail employees’ intention to stay (ITS) through sequential mediation by employer branding (EB) and organizational identification (OI). Design/methodology/approach Data collected using a structured questionnaire from three hundred and five frontline employees working with twenty-nine Indian retail outlets in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) region was tested using structural equation modelling. Findings Findings confirmed the impact of both CSRI and TL on ITS, with sequential mediation by EB and OI. While OI partially mediated the effect of EB on ITS, TL exerted more influence than CSRI in enhancing EB. Originality/value This study enhances retail literature by empirically testing a unique fusion of organization and individual-level predictors that influence ITS as an individual-level outcome. Having TL and a firm corporate philosophy of CSR spending can enhance a retailer’s image as a preferred employer brand and generate OI to successfully address employee turnover

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.