Research On The Influence Of Knowledge Workers’ Silence Behavior To Their Turnover Intention

With the advent of knowledge economy, knowledge workers have become an important resource for enterprises to participate in market competition. They have a wealth of knowledge, experience and technology, and a good learning ability. They could integrate, use and re-create knowledge. Knowledge workers have already become an important part of enterprises’ core competencies. The organizations often exist a phenomenon that employees are familiar with business issues, but they deliberately keep their point, or do not express their views, which is a concrete manifestation of employee silence behavior. Milliken and Morrison (2000) believed that employee silence behavior will cause them feeling not be taken seriously, and feeling a lack of control and cognitive dissonance, which led to low level of job satisfaction, turnover intention even turnover behavior and other negative effectsBy learning the literature of employee silence behavior, job satisfaction and turnover intention, this paper found that some scholars’ researches have showed that employee silence behavior will reduce the employees’ job satisfaction. Moreover, job satisfaction is one of the important factors of turnover intention. Therefore, this article assumes that employee silence behavior has a positive impact on turnover intention. In order to validate this hypothesis, this paper based on knowledge workers. And took employee silence behavior as independent variables and turnover intention as dependent variable, job satisfaction as mediating variables, and build the model. At the same time, this paper designed a questionnaire which is based on the research of others scholars. We collected relevant data through issued the questionnaire, and used SPSS18.0for factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, one-way factor analysis of variance. The results showed that employee silence behavior and its three dimensions-acquiescence silence, ignorance silence and defensive silence have a positive impact on turnover intention; job satisfaction and its four dimensions-the work itself, self-realization, the level of leadership and interpersonal relation play part of the intermediary role between employee silence behavior and turnover intention. The above hypothesis have been verified. Although employee silence behavior generally exists in organizations, many managers rarely pay attention to them. This study found that knowledge workers’ silence behavior will significantly affect turnover intention. We hope that this will cause managers to focus on knowledge workers’silence behavior and avoid the loss of high-value employee.