Abstract:
Of late, retaining talent is one of the maladies confronted by many organisations, to wit highly talented, motivated and committed workforce stays on the organisation for a shorter period of time. Drawing on person job fit theory, the prime objective of this study was to investigate the role educational attainment of employees on the relationship between employee commitment and turnover intentions. Pivoting on strong ontological and epistemological assumptions, this study adopted a survey strategy with a deductive approach. Data were garnered with a self-administrated questionnaire from a randomly selected 150 employees working in eight finance companies based in Jaffna district. In concord with previous studies conducted in Western countries, the data confirm a negative relationship between employee commitment and turnover intentions implying that highly committed workforce would have little intentions to leave the current job. Moreover, this research substantially found a moderating role of educational attainment of the relationship between employee commitment and turnover intentions. Specially, the negative relationship between employee commitment and turnover intentions is stronger for employees who are less qualified, however such relationship turned out to be positive for those who are highly qualified explaining that highly committed workforce with a high level of educational attainment would have the intentions to leave the current job. Therefore, segregation of the levels of commitment would not be the best indicator in deciding employees' stay in an organisation. Unequivocally, this study made theoretical contributions to the frontiers of commitment literature and proffers practical implications and guiding directions for future research studies.
