An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Psychological Contract On Knowledge Workers' Turnover Intention In Star-Rated Hotels

In recent years, hotel industry has been developing very fast in scales with the development of tourism industry. Meanwhile, there exists great uncertainty in hotels' operations and management. Related materials show that the turnover rate of knowledge workers in star-rated hotels is one of the most important problems. The research about the reason for knowledge workers' turnover has profound academic values and urgent practical significance.According to the literature review, empirical research about knowledge workers' turnover on the Chinese background is far behind, and most of them are of single variables or static research. Therefore, it's necessary to systemically and logically construct appropriate analytical models from a boarder perspective, taking into account knowledge workers' career features. This research, starting from the relationship between hotels and their knowledge workers, applies psychological contract theory, together with industry characteristics and knowledge workers ' career features, into the integration, enlargement and improvement of the present research models. In addition, the research considers the psychological contracts on both employees' individual level and employee-company level, constructing two models, which studies and proves the interrelationship among all variables of the models, compares and analyzes the results, aiming at complementing the theory on turnover intention of knowledge workers.This research focuses on four points in its model construction. Firstly, it regards the psychological contract as the antecedent of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Secondly, it regards knowledge workers' immediate superiors as the representatives of hotels. Thirdly, it confirms knowledge workers' career features when the relationships between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Fourthly, it comparably analyzes the influence of psychological contract on knowledge workers' turnover intention. In fact, the research includes two empirical researches: aspect 1 - from employees' perspective, and aspect 2 - from employees' and organization's perspective. Both aspects integrate job satisfaction and organizational commitment to construct knowledge workers' turnover intention model.The research scales are based on related domestic and foreign mature scales, also are polished and adjusted according to open-ended interviews with employees' and small sample pre-test. The research samples are collected from three-star and above hotels in Sichuan province. The data analysis software is SPSS 13.0 & LISREL 8.54, including descriptive statistics analysis, reliability analysis, validity analysis and structure equation model analysis.The result of this empirical study shows that, firstly, these two models show similar functions; secondly, the psychological contract conspicuously affects knowledge workers' turnover intention in both narrow and broad senses, which indirectly takes effect through organizational commitment, and the relations between organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Thus, this research proves that, from employees' individual angle and on the employee-company level, "psychological contracts exist as the antecedent of job satisfaction and organizational commitment.The innovation of this research lies in points as follows. (1) It regards the psychological contract as the antecedent. (2) It applies the rare "incongruence" psychological contract violation measurement into its investigation on the influence of psychological contract on the turnover intention of knowledge workers and other variables in a broad sense. (3) It proves the view of "the psychological contract exists as the antecedent job satisfaction and organizational commitment. (4) It partly identifies the employee turnover model of Steers & Mowday (1981). (5) It further explains Turnley & Feldman's view (1999) that "employees are more likely to take their immediate superiors' commitment as the psychological contract violation and have negative emotions". (6) It makes a comprehensive empirical research on the hotel industry on the theoretical level of the psychological contract theory, which leads the present researches in this field and bases its relative diagrams on knowledge workers' career features, which belongs to empirical studies on knowledge workers' turnover intention.The instructional significance of this research lies in two ways.On one hand, the result shows that the working support violation of the psychological contract affects knowledge workers' turnover intention the mostly. Therefore, it is better for hotels to focus more on the working support for knowledge workers, set their ties loose on their employee management, construct a harmonious working environment, meet their working support expectation, and then agree on the future development contract with employees, so as to enhance employees' loyalty toward them.