Pay Satisfaction and Work Meaningfulness as Factors of IT Professionals’ Turnover Intentions: an Investigation in the Romanian Context

IT employees constitute an important category of workforce, hence their retaining is of great importance. Consequently, there is a great need of understanding the factors that predispose these professionals to turnover, in order to provide companies with solutions that would diminish the turnover rates among their IT staff. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the role of certain specific factors of turnover among these professionals, and to present a research on this topic in the Romanian context. The empirical study focused on two types of factors that might influence turnover intentions in a sample of Romanian IT professionals: financial (pay satisfaction and organizational justice) and self-concept related (work meaningfulness and work role fit). The results confirm our hypothesis and reveal two parallel lines of influence on Romanian IT employees’ turnover intentions. First, they show that pay satisfaction exerts a significant influence on employees’ intentions to leave the organization. Pay satisfaction is, in its turn, affected by two facets of perceived organizational justice, namely distributive and procedural justice, and partially mediates the effect of these variables on turnover intentions. The other line of results shows that turnover intentions are also influenced by employees’ work meaningfulness, and that the latter depends on their perceived work role fit, or the match between their self-concept and the work tasks that they have to perform in their current job. Finally, meaningfulness was found to fully mediate the influence of work role fit on turnover intentions.