Breaches and buffers: Can meaningful work impact turnover during COVID-19 pandemic?

Abstract

The fear and uncertainty created by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have strained the employer-employee relationship. This research seeks to understand how psychological contract breach shapes employees' perspectives of meaningful work and its influence on turnover intention. Drawing on event systems theory, we investigated how objective events in the environment (e.g., global pandemic) impact employees. We also argue that the career shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic affected employees' choices based on their job fit and psychological resources. Findings indicate that experiencing meaningful work reduced turnover intention, especially for those that experienced less psychological contract breach. Also, experiencing meaningful work reduced turnover intention most for individuals whose working hours were not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings show that experiencing meaningful work in a relatively stable job reduces employees' potential turnover during exogenous shocks. The study also highlights the importance of meaningful work and why organizations should collaborate and assist their employees in making work more meaningful.

Increase Employee Retention: Impact Work-Life Balance, Meaningful Work, and Job Satisfaction Towards Turnover Intention

“…Work that provides meaning, both in employee and company self-development can provide a sense of accomplishment, identity, and self-actualization for employees so that employees feel connected to work and the company where they work, thereby reducing the desire to quit their jobs. The results of this study are in line with the results of research conducted by (Siahaan & Gatari, 2020) (Heath et al, 2022) and(Charles-Leija et al, 2023), it was found that there is a negative relationship between meaningful work and turnover intention. These findings shows that people who feel their work is meaningful are more likely to feel fit into the organization and don't want to move away from their job or company.…”

“…Seeing the importance of the manufacturing industry sector in the economy in Indonesia, it is important to maintain and attract human resources interest in this sector. Some previous studies say employee turnover intention can be caused by several non-physical or intangible factors such as work-life balance (Talukder et al, 2018) meaningful work (Heath et al, 2022) (Sony & Mekoth, 2019), and job satisfaction (Alias et al, 2018) (Skelton et al, 2020).…”

The workplace of the future: the COVID-19 pandemic and working from home in Swiss small businesses

“…This suggests that leaders with a digital mindset (AlNuaimi et al, 2022), which would be expected to be associated with greater degrees of WFH, are still relatively rare in the Swiss MSEs studied. Alternatively, the findings of Heath et al (2024) would suggest that the period of experimentation with WFH was simply too short, as "novel, disruptive, and critical events are more likely to change behaviours when they have a longer duration and when the strength increases over time" (Heath et al, 2024, p. 85).…”