Linking Transformational Leadership to Employee Turnover: The Moderating Role of Alternative Job Opportunity

Abstract

Corporations all over the world strive for competitiveness in the quest to improving the performance of their businesses. The issue of holding on to firms’ talented employees has thus become critical in contemporary business operations. People must therefore be managed in ways which seek to elicit favorable behavioural responses targeted at creating customer satisfaction and consequent business efficacy. It is however not uncommon to find talented employees leave their current jobs for others. This paper therefore examined the influence of transformational leadership behaviours on employee turnover intention with the moderating effect of alternative job opportunity. A cross-sectional, descriptive, correlational survey design was adopted for the paper, with a multi-stage sampling approach used in selecting three hundred and five (305) employees from banks in Ghana. Correlational and hierarchical regressional analytical procedures were used to test the hypotheses. Transformational leadership behaviours were found to be negatively related to employees’ voluntary organisational turnover intention but the availability of alternative job opportunities did not moderate the transformational leadership-turnover intention nexus. Within the Ghanaian banking industry, leadership behaviours that focus more on the needs of subordinates as a critical part of task accomplishment is laud by employees and thus mitigate their intention to quit the organisation for other lucrative offers. It is thus incumbent on management to employ more of transformational leadership behaviours as an efficient tool to addressing the severe consequences of turnover in the Ghanaian banking industry.