Why Employee Turnover? The influence of Chinese Management and Organizational Justice

Employee turnover is an important topic in organizational behavior research. Understanding how to address turnover in Chinese organizations is also a practice problem. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of paternalistic leadership (authoritarianism, benevolence, and morality) on employee turnover and examine the moderating effect of organizational justice (distributive justice, interactional justice, and procedural justice). Data were collected from 207 supervisor and subordinate dyads of 51 stores in a Chinese food and beverage company. Paternalistic leadership and organizational justice were initially collected from subordinates. After six months, employee turnover was collected from supervisors. The results indicate that benevolent and moral leadership were both negatively related to employee turnover. Authoritarianism failed to predict employee turnover. Furthermore, the relationship between authoritarianism and employee turnover is moderated by distributive justice and procedural justice. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.