Role of internal marketing, organizational commitment, and job stress in discerning the turnover intention of Korean nurses

Abstract

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the discriminating factors of Korean nurses' turnover intention (TI) among internal marketing (IM), organizational commitment (OC), and job stress (JS).

Methods: Nurses (n = 185) who had worked for 1-10 years were surveyed from six general hospitals in South Korea. The data were collected by using questionnaires and were analyzed with descriptive statistics and discriminant analysis.

Results: The participants were grouped into three groups, depending on the level of their TI: "low TI group" (n = 58), "moderate TI group" (n = 96), and "high TI group" (n = 31). One function significantly discriminated between the high TI and low TI groups. The function correctly classified 84.3% of the participants into the two groups and 75.3% were correctly classified in the cross-validation. Organizational commitment was the most important factor. Job stress and the IM components of staffing-promotion, reward, management philosophy, working environment, and segmentation were significant discriminant factors of TI.

Conclusion: Based on the findings of this study, we could conclude that OC, JS, and IM play important roles in the TI of nurses. Implying a career development system as an OC management strategy, an innovative promotion policy to change conservative organizational climates and a balance of effort-reward can be considered as managerial interventions to reduce nurses' TI.