Determinants of job-hopping behavior: the case of information technology sector

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how emotional experience factors affect the obligation-related commitment. The emotional experience factors consist of positive factor, job satisfaction and negative factor, and emotional exhaustion from the study of Wong and Tay (2010); both facets have been studied with affective commitment but yet lack of study about normative commitment. Affective and normative commitments are both components of organizational commitment; while affective commitment refers to the intention of keeping the position because of the desire but not by any other attachment, whereas normative commitment is defined as staying for the reasons related to obligation. Also, by applying withdrawal construct of validation of job-hopping behavior, a connection was constructed between normative commitment and the two separated motives of job-hopping behavior, advance motive and escape motive (Lake et al., 2017).

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve such objectives, quantitative research is implicated using the primary data collected from online and offline surveys from employees who are currently working in many information technology (IT)-related companies in Ho Chi Minh City. As for analyzing tactic and method, SmartPLS software is applied to ensure the reliability and validity of the factors as well as confirming the significant and developing the hypotheses from the proposed construct.

Findings

The findings reveal the significant affect from workplace escape motive that leads to the behavior of job hop, but not from the career enhancement. The result also revealed the effect of indebted obligation when most of the employees maintain the low level of normative commitment and the proper increase in emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction can help to improve the normative commitment of such employees.

Originality/value

This study makes its contribution and recommendations to human resource management in IT industry.

Citation

Nguyen, H.-P. and Le, H.-N. (2022), "Determinants of job-hopping behavior: the case of information technology sector", International Journal of Law and Management, Vol. 64 No. 3, pp. 308-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLMA-06-2020-0178