Elena Gečaitė Student no. 11731427
1st February 2019 Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication
MSc Communication Science (Corporate communication) University of Amsterdam
Abstract
Employees are the most essential resource that grants productivity, efficiency, engagement to the corporate processes as well as the quality of the outcome for every organization. Nowadays many companies face generational shifts where older workers are replaced by younger profession-als. Today’s market is dominated by Millennial employees who are believed to have different atti-tudes, values, and preferences regarding their workplace. Millennials are perceived as frequent job changers. Constant employees turnover poses threats to organizations, hence managers need innov-ative solutions to increase employees job satisfaction and willingness to stay. The majority of acad-emic papers focuses on Millennials in Western European countries, thereby neglecting Eastern Eu-ropean cultures and the differences between economic, historical and political backgrounds.
Therefore, the present study investigated two prevalent workplace conditions, namely satis-faction of organizational monetary incentives and flexible workplace arrangements and their impact on employees workplace turnover intentions in Western and Eastern parts of Europe. The findings of the online survey (N=79) proved that Eastern Europeans have more turnover intentions than Western Europeans, which is most likely due to contrasting economic development and socio-eco-nomic factors of the region. Furthermore, employees that are satisfied with their financial gains from the company have fewer turnover intentions than people with flexible workplace designs. These findings provide insights to companies that have high turnover rates as well as to those that have younger employees among their personnel by showing that Millennials in different regions should be approached respectively.
Keywords: Millennials, employees, flexible workplace, monetary incentives, turnover intentions, Eastern Europe, Western Europe.
Introduction
The global job market is experiencing a generational shift — by 2020, approximately 50 percent of all workplaces worldwide are going to be taken over by younger employees, the so-called Millennials (also referred as Generation Y or GenY). They are usually described as a genera-tion born between 1980 and 2000 (O’Connor & Raile, 2015; Thompson & Gregory, 2012; Stanley, 2015). The ongoing change of generations in the labor market has its’ impact on multiple levels, one of them being an increase in employees’ intentions to switch their workplaces more frequently (Lyons, Schweitzer, Ng & Kuron, 2012). This growing tendency of jobs turnover is not a complete-ly new phenomenon and yet the concept itself is mostcomplete-ly related to Generation Y. Traditionalcomplete-ly, older generations were believed to have high levels of organizational commitment, hence they were used to stay at one job for longer, sometimes even resulting in never changing a workplace during their lifetime (Lyons, Schweitzer, Ng & Kuron, 2012). Millennial generation seems to have a different approach when it comes to a workplace and organizational loyalty (Kowske, Rasch & Wiley, 2010). Younger employees are believed to be getting more and more comfortable in quitting their work-place voluntarily for new opportunities, for instance, to gain more professional experience and sig-nificantly accelerate their careers (Maertz & Griffeth, 2004).
Employees are a fundamental resource needed for every organization to maintain produc-tivity, efficiency, achieve its’ goals and stay competitive in the market (Shaw, 2011), thus growing personnel turnover can pose serious risks to an organization. The biggest damage of turnover is the loss of valuable workers, so-called high-performers who are responsible for high complexity tasks in an organization and who are hard to replace (Keller & Meaney, 2017). Another possible threat of high turnover is a difficulty to prove future workers about company’s good working environment and culture, therefore, it may cause damage to the reputation of a company in the labor market and make it harder to attract new talents (Helm, 2013). Another downside is that the leakage of talent costs organizations money and can be a threat to overall productivity. Jobs that require more
inter-actions and are information-based usually involve new employees training which increases in costs if a company has to invest in constantly changing personnel. Finding and recruiting new team members takes time, money and effort, which can harm the efficiency in the long-run (Park & Shaw, 2013). These threats may be avoided or mitigated by tailoring an institutional approach to the changing profiles of employees in order to develop the most optimal strategies for attracting new members and retaining the current workforce.
The growing body of research on Millennials’ preferences and attitudes towards work-place signifies the importance of this topic. Yet, it can be noticed that the majority of studies that explore Millennial employees are based in Western Europe, leaving the Eastern part of Europe, es-pecially those countries from the ex-communist block, underrepresented. The reason behind it may be the usage of the term ‘Millennial’ itself which has already become a buzzword. The concept is applied regarding only the criteria of age range while neglecting other essential factors that may create contrasts within GenY in different regions. Generational theories note that generations form a collective identity with similar core values based on external experiences and social events happen-ing at that time (Schewe & Meredith, 2004). However, it should be noted that the external impacts might be more important in one region and overlooked in another, thus Millennials in Western Eu-rope might have formed a divergent identity from Millennials in Eastern EuEu-rope. That is why the reconsideration of the whole Millennial concept and its usage in different contexts is vital. Variating socio-economic climate, as well as contrasting historical background, give a rationale to assume that Millennials in Western Europe might have slightly different attitudes and behaviors towards professional life than those in Eastern Europe.
Therefore, the main aim of this research is to provide insights of what can be done by an organization internally in order to slow down or decrease the levels of turnover intentions of its’ Millennial employees in two regions of Europe. Previous research has shown that Millennials are not anymore just about the financial gains, they find it important for a workplace to have a good
or-ganizational culture, corporate values, diversity and grant employee’s autonomy (Calk & Patrick, 2017). To grasp more profoundly, what motivations may influence Millennials intentions to quit or to stay, this study takes into account two popular workplace conditions. The first is a worker’s satis-faction of monetary incentives that an organization is providing, namely, the salary and compensa-tions. The second condition is related to non—monetary job benefits, i.e., the possibility to have flexible working arrangements, also called workplace flexibility. It is expected to see a significant difference between the attitudes of people working in Eastern and Western Europe towards both, the satisfaction of monetary incentives and workplace flexibility, therefore, the research question of the paper goes as following:
RQ: to what extent do conditions like the satisfaction of organizational monetary incentives and flexible workplace arrangements may differently influence employees’ workplace turnover in-tentions between Millennial employees in Western and Eastern Europe?
Finding an answer to this question is beneficial due to several reasons. First, from the acad-emic perspective, the whole study will contribute to the growing research of employees in the East-ern regions of Europe. Secondly, since it is expected to find significant differences between Millen-nials in deviating contexts, the results of the study may encourage future research to acknowledge the contrasts between Millennials in Eastern and Western parts of Europe as well as to avoid vast generalizations towards the whole generation. From a managerial perspective, this study will help to establish a better understanding of Millennial needs and driving motivations in the workplace. This paper may stimulate decision-makers to think of more innovative employee retainment strategy in order to tackle high turnover rates in their organization. It may as well encourage leaders to pay at-tention to practices held in Western European companies and implement them only when tailored to their own organization’s cultural specifics.
The concept of Millennials
In academia, there is quite a debate about the threshold years when differentiating Millenni-als from other generations. Many previous works are considering the gap from 1980 until 2000 as the milestone years of Generation Y (Kadlot, 2016; Yarbrough, Martin, Alfred & McNeill, 2017; McGinnis Johnson, & Ng, 2016). In contrast to people from Generation X (born between mid 1960s and early 1980s) that were growing in times of economic instability, recession, high unemployment rates (Kupperschmidt, 2000), Generation Y is usually being perceived as autonomous individualists, highly self-centric, seeking for instant gratifications and constant feedback, highly mobile (which is sometimes seen as a lack of loyalty) and digital natives (Alsop, 2008; Zemke, Raines & Filipczak, 2000; Hobart, 2008). Due to the digitation revolution started in the 1970s, Generation Y is more ed-ucated and technologically savvy which also makes them more interconnected globally than any previous generation before (Hobart, 2008). They are also perceived as deviating from previous gen-erations with their values and behavior in working environments (Lyons, Schweitzer, Ng & Kuron, 2012; Wey Smola & Sutton, 2002; Twenge, 2010; Twenge & Campbell, 2008). Millennials are ea-ger to have a meaningful job with a positive environment, thus they are not afraid to shift from one workplace to another in order to satisfy their needs in corporate surroundings which reinforces so-called boundary-less career option when an employee feels able to freely move between different jobs in different organizations (Arthur & Rousseau, 2001). These generalizations about the whole Generation Y are very common in academic research. Generational theories describe ‘generation’ as a cohort of people born ‘over roughly the span of a phase of life who share a common location in history and, hence, a common collective persona’ (Strauss & Howe, 1997, 61). This definition indi-cates that people in the same generation are exposed to similar historical events which allow creat-ing resonatcreat-ing experiences throughout life. These experiences are the key shapers of inner values that usually do not drastically change in the lifetime and generates so-called ‘peer personality’ of the whole generation (Schewe & Meredith, 2004; Strauss & Howe, 1997). This concept of
collec-tive identity encourages many researchers to see GenY as one homogeneous unit with similar pref-erences, attitudes, and values. This idea is as well reinforced by technological advancement and the fact that Millennials are highly digitally interconnected and can easily access the content from other cultures within seconds which may impact the perspectives of Millennials all around (Barsh, Brown & Kian, 2016). However, the same historical events may have different strength of influence in dif-ferent regions, for example, Western European employees might have a difdif-ferent outlook towards job than Eastern Europeans. For this reason, this research takes into account respondents from both parts of Europe, the East, and the West, although the majority of theoretical background presented is based on the research done among Millennials in the Western cultures.
Millennials and the workplace turnover intentions
On the contrary to the previous Generation X employees, Millennials have different percep-tions when it comes to loyalty and organizational commitment. Previous research unanimously claims that Millennials are more likely to deprive in commitment to workplace and work ethics, which make it easier for them to change jobs more often than for the previous generation (Thomp-son & Gregory, 2012; Becton, Walker & Jones-Farmer, 2014). Generation Y workers started enter-ing labor market around the 2000s (Lyons, Schweitzer, Ng & Kuron, 2012) and just a few years later academic studies pointed out Millennials’ tendency to constant workplace turnover (Eby, Butts, & Lockwood, 2003; Lancaster & Stillman, 2002; Alsop, 2008).
Corporate psychology theories usually indicate a very close relationship between turnover intentions and an actual resigning of the employees, hence the intentions to quit are held as an accu-rate measurement for voluntary workforce movement across sectors and companies (Dixon & Hart, 2010; Sousa-Poza & Henneberger, 2004). The majority of young employees are believed to not have intentions to maintain a long-term working contract with only one organization (Eby, Butts, & Lockwood, 2003; Baruch, 2004), hence frequent job change is becoming more and more prevalent. In the survey conducted in 2012, 60% of Millennials responded to have already switched their
workplace at least once and around 60% of employed respondents claimed it to be unlikely for them to remain in one organization during their career period (Thompson & Gregory, 2012). One of the most recent studies by Deloitte introduces survey data results of Millennial perceptions to job mo-bility, corporate environment, and the attributes to reach higher job satisfaction. Apparently, corpo-rate loyalty is not the priority value for Millennials as 43% of respondents claimed to have plans to leave their jobs within a two-year period and only 28% have expressed a wish to stay at the current organization for five years or more. The number of Millennials ready to hop to a new workplace has increased since 2017 and it has been estimated to grow in numbers even more rapidly in the future (Deloitte, 2018). Another study reported that on average Millennials change six jobs until they reach the age of 30, in comparison to Generation X that on average used to change their workplace three times (Lyons, Schweitzer, Ng & Kuron, 2012).
The growing popularity of gig economy which allows employees to have many short-term working contracts as well as high flexibility and work only with specific tasks or for a defined peri-od with almost no connection to the employer (Friedman, 2014), may serve as a proof of younger generation need for more autonomy as well as lower commitment to one workplace. Many Millen-nial workers perceive gig economy as an appealing alternative to a full-time job (Deloitte, 2018) which may indicate that employees are valuing flexible arrangement more than stability, hence the idea of hopping from one project to another may exponentially grow in popularity in the future.
Among the possible reasons for growing rates of Millennial turnover, researchers empha-size that usually, younger workers are not leaving companies, they are leaving their managers (Thompson & Gregory, 2012). Poor leadership style together with undeveloped organizational cul-ture can increase employees dissatisfaction of a workplace which commonly results in lower pro-ductivity, creativity, and commitment (Tsai, 2011). Successful management is essential for making employees see their tasks as meaningful (Ng, Schweitzer, & Lyons, 2010).
The majority of studies about Millennials and their characteristics are conducted in Western cultures, therefore young generation in Eastern cultures, especially in Eastern Europe is still under-represented in the academic field. Developed economies in the Western part of Europe posses high-er GDP phigh-er capita as well as lowhigh-er national unemployment rates than emhigh-erging economies, not to mention that the minimum salary in the Western societies is higher than in the East of Europe. Higher unemployment has been found to have a positive relationship with work turnover (Joseph, Pierrard & Sneessens, 2004) while GDP per capita is believed to be strongly positively correlated with job satisfaction (Torgler, 2011). Job satisfaction is an essential predictor for employees work-ing behaviors, since it has been positively correlated with job quittwork-ing intentions, low productivity and decreased engagement with one’s corporate tasks (Torgler, 2011; Judge, Thoresen, Bono & Pat-ton, 2001; Yalabik, RayPat-ton, & Rapti, 2017).
Due to different historical development, post-communist block countries in Eastern Europe did not have possibilities to grow economically as rapidly as states in Western Europe which increased so-cio-economic inequality between regions. Only after the Iron Curtain fell down, in 1989, ex-USSR countries began their transition from planning to market economies (Meyer & Peng, 2016). Many countries in the Eastern side of Europe today are still perceived as emerging economies which gives a rationale to assume that prevalent differences from developed economies might be causing differ-ent Millennials behavior in the labor market in the region.
Recent research has shed some light on contrasting working facets between Western and Eastern poles of Europe. In Eastern Europe, people tend to work longer hours than in the West which may be a cause for lower job satisfaction (Torgler, 2011; Sousa-Poza & Henneberger, 2004). Nonetheless, Vani K. Borooah has stated that dissatisfaction with one’s job can be as well caused by personal phycological factors as overall unhappiness level in the country (2009). OECD indicates that life satisfaction across Europe is at the lowest points in Southern and Eastern European coun-tries, whilst Scandinavia and Western Europe are leaders in life quality ratings (OECD, 2017).
Cor-respondingly, United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network report on overall happi-ness levels around the globe served evidence that Eastern Europeans feel less happy than Europeans in the West or Northern side of Europe (Sachs, Layard & Helliwell, 2018). Another reason is be-lieved to be as a lack of meaningfulness and a sense of being ‘important’ in one’s corporate role (Torgler, 2011) which is related to management styles of the company. In Eastern Europe organiza-tional leaders use divergent strategies from those used in the Western cultures to motivate employ-ees grounding the major motivations on monetary rewards such as pay raise and bonuses rather than on internal work facets such as more flexible working schedules, possibilities for more social inter-actions among colleagues or constant feedback for personal growth (Torgler, 2011; Suutari, 1998). The most recent studies emphasize the importance of non-monetary motivations to Millennial em-ployees, such as recognition, intellectual stimulus, fringe benefits, in order to increase the levels of job satisfaction and engagement (Deloitte, 2018; Chordiya, Sabharwal, & Goodman, 2017). The deviances in employees’ preferences by region gives the motive to believe that Millennials in East-ern and WestEast-ern parts of Europe may have different workplace turnover tendencies, therefore the first hypothesis is formulated as follows:
H1: Millennial workers in Eastern European countries are more likely to have more work-place turnover intentions than employees in Western Europe.
Millennial and importance of monetary gains
There is plenty of research made about Millennials attitude towards extrinsic motivations in the workplace. According to Ryan and Deci (2000), extrinsic motivations are tangible outcomes re-lated to one’s job, such as salary, bonuses or status. GenY is sometimes seen as having too high ex-pectations when it comes to their career advancement, i.e., salary raise or promotion (Erickson, 2009). Millennials are usually expecting to have their first pay raise in approximately six months without taking into account their job performance. This impatience for career success provided a reason for employers to see Millennials as disloyal, delusional and too self-reliant. There is even a
term in academia related to GenY eagerness to speed up their career — the ‘ability-performance nexus’ describes the gap between GenY workers expectations of work achievements and their actual abilities (Hill, 2002). Thus, when the monetary incentives of an organization are not satisfying, Mil-lennials may start looking for a different workplace that could allegedly ensure the financial expec-tations (Twenge, Campbell, Hoffman & Lance, 2010). Hence, there is a rationale to believe that the satisfaction of monetary gains is related to turnover intentions for Millennials.
It has been already mentioned that there are substantial reasons to presume that GenY peo-ple may differ depending on their region of living and working. Since the economic growth in East-ern and WestEast-ern parts of Europe is not particularly equal, which may also indicate that workers in Western Europe might, in general, have less workplace turnover intentions due to the higher finan-cial attributes companies are willing to pay. For example, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the highest average salary levels in 2016 were concentrat-ed in Western European countries — Luxembourg, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Austria and Belgium. Meanwhile, the lowest average salary levels were detected in Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovak Republic and Estonia (OECD, 2016a). Due to this statistic, it is assumed that Western Europeans might put less emphasis on their job financial gains and respectively might have fewer intentions to quit their work than Eastern Europeans since their satisfaction of extrinsic motivations is expected to be higher. Thus, the second hypothesis is formulated as follows:
H2: Millennial employees in Western Europe have lower turnover intentions than Millennial employees in Eastern Europe when moderated by the satisfaction of monetary incentives.
Millennials and flexible workplace arrangements
Workplace flexibility (also called flex-work, agile workplace, flexible working designs or arrangements, new ways of working) is usually defined as a possibility for an employee to choose when and where to work (ter Hoeven & van Zoonen, 2015) in order to comply professional life with personal interest or family. More flexible arrangements are believed to increase organizational
commitment (Scholarios & Marks, 2004) and job satisfaction. More flexibility as well helps to cre-ate a more positive working environment (Deloitte, 2018) and even have an impact on employees’ well-being and can prevent them from burnout (Grant, Christianson & Price, 2007; De Menezes & Kelliher, 2011). Young professionals tend to stay longer with the employer who can grant higher levels in flexibility so the Millennials can maintain a better work-life balance and have more auton-omy to coordinate their tasks (Baruch, 2004). Flexible arrangements as well indicate the higher lev-el of trust that employer puts in its’ employees and their ability to meet deadlines at their own pace (Deloitte, 2018).
The more agile working environment can bring beneficial results to the whole organization as it may improve knowledge-sharing among employees and in result allows tasks to run more smoothly (Coenen & Kok, 2014). As well, more flexible workplaces are believed to increase their overall efficiency in a long-run (Hunter, 2019). Implementing more agile approaches are especially beneficial to small and medium-sized companies since it allows to limit costs while maintaining ef-ficiency (Townsend, McDonald & Cathcart, 2017). Despite the proved benefits of flex-work, there are plenty of stereotypes and myths about new ways of working that may hinder its’ implementa-tion. The existing policy might be not enough in order to benefit from flexible working designs. Some companies have flex-work policies but due to administrative barriers, employees might hesi-tate to use the possibility. As well, the organizational climate may get into the way of successful flex-work implementations. Other colleagues may see those who are using flexible arrangements more frequently as more slackers or less efficient ones (Putman, Myers, & Gailliard, 2014). Recent OECD survey notes that employers in Western Europe have a more favorable approach towards workplace flexibility than employers in Eastern Europe. According to the study, the most flex-work friendly parts of Europe are Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Austria, France, and Belgium, mean-while, countries that hesitate to implement more agile environments are located in Eastern Europe (OECD, 2016b). For this reason, the third hypothesis is formulated respectively:
H3: Millennial employees in Western Europe have lower turnover intentions than Millennial employees in Eastern Europe when moderated by the workplace flexibility.
The fourth hypothesis was elaborated from the theories already mentioned above. It has been discussed that Generation Y is eager to gain financial attributes at work as fast as they can, thus the ‘money factor’ is important to both Eastern and Western European. Since the salary levels are not that satisfying and flex-work environments may still seem rather alien to the Eastern Euro-peans, it might be a case that Eastern Europeans who participated in this study ranked low on both, satisfaction on monetary incentives as well as having flexible working conditions. There is an evi-dence that both working conditions, i.e., flexible workplace and financial gains, have a potential to significantly influence employees turnover intentions, but in this study, it is argued that one of the conditions might have a bigger effect on workers intentions to resign. For this reason, the fourth hypothesis is two-fold:
H4a: There is a difference between satisfaction of monetary incentives and workplace flexi-bility effect to influence workplace turnover intentions of Millennial employees.
H4b: The interaction effect of satisfaction of monetary incentives to influence turnover in-tentions in comparison to the interaction effect of workplace flexibility to influence turnover inten-tions is stronger for Eastern Europeans than for Western Europeans.
All hypotheses, as well as the relations between all of the variables used in this research, are illus-trated in graph 1.
Methodology Research design
To answer a research question of the study, a cross-sectional survey was chosen as the main research design for several reasons. Due to the formulation of hypotheses which was focused on employees personal preferences and attitudes towards both moderators and the dependent variable, the survey turned out to be the most optimal design to gather data from working professionals. Sur-vey design allows collecting data from a big number of respondents simultaneously with low time or money costs. Since the time for this research was limited, the design had to be easy to distribute and not very time-consuming.
Procedure
A 6-minute-long online questionnaire was distributed in two flows. The first flow allowed the survey to circulate for two and a half week, from the 6th of December until the 24th of Decem-ber in order to gather as much data as possible as well giving respondents more time to provide
Turnover inten-tions Satisfaction of monetary
incentives
Workplace flexibility Type of employee (working in
Eastern or Western Europe)
Graph 1
Conceptual framework
H1 H2/H4a/H4b
their answers. The second flow of the survey was launched from January 7th until January 12th. Respondents were approached using two sampling methods — convenient sample and snowball sample methods. First, respondents were invited to fill in the survey through social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) and as well asked to share the link of the survey with their friends who would be eligible for the research. Furthermore, people were asked to fill in the survey during a professional networking event in Amsterdam on the researcher’s tablet on the spot. Before taking the questionnaire, all respondents were introduced to the purpose of the research and contact infor-mation of the researcher. It was clearly stated that the anonymity of the respondents is guaranteed as well as the right to leave the survey at any time. After collecting the whole dataset, responses were analyzed using SPSS and PROCESS v3.0 by Andrew F. Hayes (2013) statistical programs.
Sample
The total number of respondents reached 141, however, since there were certain characteris-tics applied for the sample, only respondents who complied with age, region, employment, and workplace features were included in the final sample (N=79). Since the sample was specifically lim-ited to explore turnover intentions of Millennial employees, at the beginning of the questionnaire respondents were asked to indicate their age and gender. While gender was being held as a control variable, age was needed in order to classify respondents into Millennials and non-Millennials. Only the respondents who were born after 1980 and before 2000 were considered eligible for the survey. All respondents had to be Europeans and employed full-time (working at least 35 hours a week) and work in a ‘white-collar’ position. The final sample consisted of people between 22 and 37 years (M= 26.3, SD= 3.44). Among the respondents, 30.4% were male and 69.6% were female. The majority of the sample was highly educated, 55.7% claimed to have obtained a Bachelor’s de-gree while 41.7% claimed to have obtained Master’s or Ph.D. dede-gree.
Demographics. At the beginning of the questionnaire, respondents were asked demographic questions in order to make sure they are eligible for the sample. Respondents had to indicate their age, a country where they work, highest education degree obtained, weekly working hours and cur-rent occupation in order to make sure that respondents were white-collar workers, i.e., skilled pro-fessionals. In order to differentiate more accurately, the question about current occupation was left open for respondents to fill it themselves. All occupations later were categorized into white-collar and blue-collar jobs according to the skills indicated on O*NET occupational classification website. The further research was conducted only with the respondents who were coded as white-collar em-ployees.
Type of employee. The independent variable of the study was measured with one of the de-mographic questions (respondents were asked to indicate the country where they are currently working) in order to be able to divide the sample into the employees of Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Since the variable was measured at the nominal level, during the analysis it was converted into a dummy variable coding Eastern European workers as 0 (n= 50) and everyone else in the sample (Western European employees) as 1 (n= 29).
Monetary incentives. The first moderator was measured at the continuous level with the questions from Q7 to Q13 (the whole questionnaire is provided in Appendix B). The questions were related to respondents’ perceptions towards financial incentives the organization was providing (salary, bonuses, compensations, promotions) and were used to measure Millennial employees satis-faction toward the financial gains. Participants were asked questions such as ‘I’m satisfied with the way in which my compensation is determined’ or ‘I’m enthusiastic about my salary level’ in order to find out how favorable they find their current compensation situation in the workplace. Respon-dents were invited to answer with one answer option ranging from 1 (1 = totally disagree) to 7 (7 = totally agree). The scale to measure attitudes toward monetary incentives was already validated and used in the previous study by M. van Herpen, M. van Paag and K. Cools (2003). After conducting a
principal component analysis (PCA) with a direct Oblimin rotation (since it was assumed that the items were correlated), the results showed that all items successfully loaded onto one factor creating a scale with one eigenvalue of 5.12 and explained 73.17% of the variance. The reliability level of the scale was high, Cronbach’s α =.94, which indicated that the scale was successfully measuring employees’ satisfaction of monetary incentives of the organization.
Flexible working conditions. Questions from Q14 to Q22 were about the second moderator of the study — current workplace flexibility in terms of time (e.g., ’I can decide when the working day starts’), location (e.g., ’I can determine where I work’) and communication technology use (e.g., ’I can determine my own work-related smartphone usage), (Ten Brummelhuis, Halbesleben & Prabhu, 2011). Answer options were provided as a 7-point Likert scale with options from 1 (1 = to-tally disagree) to 7 (7 = toto-tally agree). PCA conducted applying direct Oblimin rotation indicated that nine items loaded onto two factors — questions about time and location flexibility were indi-cated as the first factor with eigenvalue of 4.74 (explaining 52.66% of the variance) and questions about communication tools usage flexibility loaded onto different factor with eigenvalue of 1.77 (explaining 19.64% of the variance). After conducting reliability analysis it was decided to keep questions about communication tool usage flexibility in the scale since the level of reliability after eliminating the questions of the second factor did not increase much. Hence, the scale for workplace flexibility was created out of nine items (Cronbach’s α =.89).
Turnover intentions. Respondents were asked three questions (Q23 — Q25) in order to measure employees intentions to leave the current company, which is the dependent variable of this study. The scale included questions about employee’s future plans toward his or her workplace (e.g., ‘I often think about quitting’) and was measured with 7-point Likert scale the same way as the pre-vious variables. The scale for this variable was taken from prepre-vious research (Cammann, Fichman, Jenkins & Klesh, 1979). After PCA (direct Oblimin rotation) all three items created one-factor load-ing with the eigenvalue of 2.46 (explainload-ing 82.06% of the variance) and a reliability level of α =.89.
Findings
Throughout the whole analysis process, the sample size was N= 79, where 50 respondents were characterized as Eastern European employees and 29 respondents were working in Western European countries. The results are presented below in the order of stated hypotheses.
The first hypothesis (H1) stated that Millennial workers in Eastern European countries were more likely to have workplace turnover intentions than employees in Western Europe. Since it was needed to compare the turnover intentions of only two groups, independent sample t-test was used as the main analysis method to test the relationship between variables. The t-test concluded that there was a significant difference between the two groups. Levene’s test turned out to be insignifi-cant, F= .71, p= .402, hence equal variances between the groups were assumed. The t-test was sig-nificant, t(77)= -2.88, p= .005, 95% CI [-2.08, -.38], which means that the average turnover inten-tions of the Eastern European employees (M= 4.19, SD= 1.71) was significantly higher than the av-erage turnover intentions of the Western European workers (M= 2.97, SD= 2.02), hence the first hypothesis was supported — Millennials in East Europe are more likely to have more workplace turnover intentions than Millennial employees in Western Europe.
The second, third and fourth hypotheses were tested with a regression model using PROCESS v3.0 by Andrew f. Hayes statistical program. The second hypothesis (H2) stated that Millennial employees in Western Europe have lower turnover intentions than Millennial employees when moderated by the satisfaction of monetary incentives. Hence, the satisfaction of monetary in-centives was used as a moderator in the regression model. The regression model turned out to be significant, F(5, 73)= 8.542, p=.000 and therefore could be used to predict the level of workplace turnover intentions, however, the variance explained by the model was at the moderate level — 37%, (R2=.37). The effect of satisfaction of monetary incentives on the main effect of the analysis turned out to be insignificant, (b=-.31, p= .267), hence the main effect was not influenced by the
interaction and the hypothesis had to be rejected. However, the satisfaction of monetary incentives as a predictor on the dependent variable (turnover intentions) turned out to be significant (b= -.708, t= -5.48, p= .000, 95% CI [-.97, -.45]), and since the b (-.708) score is negative, it may be conclud-ed that satisfaction of financial gains at work have a negative relation toward worker’s intentions to leave the workplace, i.e., the satisfaction of financial gains decreases employees intentions to leave. The third hypothesis (H3) stated that Millennial employees in Western Europe have lower turnover intentions than Millennials in Eastern Europe when moderated by the workplace flexibility variable. As the same regression model was used with both moderators, the significance and
strength of the model remained the same as for the satisfaction of monetary incentives moderator. The interaction effect turned out to be insignificant, (b= .004, p= .988), which means that this hy-pothesis had to be rejected as well. Additionally, workplace flexibility turned out to be insignificant predictor for employees intentions for turnover (b= .053, t= .36, p= .72, 95% CI [-.24, .34]), hence it signified that there was no difference if a workplace was offering more flexible working condi-tions for its’ employees or not, because it did not affect the wish to quit current position.
The fourth hypothesis was two-fold, the first part of the hypothesis (H4a) stated that there was a difference between satisfaction of monetary incentives and workplace flexibility effect to in-fluence workplace turnover intentions of Millennial employees. From the same regression model used to test the second and third hypotheses, it could be concluded that the hypothesis was support-ed, because only satisfaction of monetary incentives turned out to be a significant predictor for turnover intentions (b= -.708, t= -5.48, p= .000, 95% CI [-.97, -.45]), meanwhile workplace flexibil-ity was recognized as an insignificant predictor (b= .053, t= .36, p= .72, 95% CI [-.24, .34]).
Both interaction effects were found to be insignificant, nonetheless, it was still possible to check another part of hypothesis number four. The second part stated that the moderation effect of satisfaction of monetary incentives to influence turnover intentions in comparison to workplace flexibility moderation effect to influence turnover intentions was stronger for Eastern Europeans
than for Western Europeans (H4b), hence two interaction effects between the moderators and inde-pendent variable were compared in order to validate if there was a significant difference between them. The fact that both effects were found insignificant does not mean the effect itself does not oc-cur in the population. To compare interaction effects, the difference between the two regression co-efficients (b values) of both moderators were compared while estimating 95% confidence intervals of both moderators. According to Cumming theory (2009), in case of less than 50% overlap of the two 95% confidence intervals, their coefficients would be considered as statistically different from each other. Hence, it was needed to calculate if the confidence intervals of both interactions would overlap. Regression coefficients, as well as boundaries of confidence intervals, are provided in Ta-ble 1.
The distance between the lower boundary of the workplace flexibility interaction was calcu-lated by subtracting regression coefficient (.0046) from the lower boundary of the confidence inter-val (-.6253) resulting in -.6299. Almost the same formula was applied to other interaction with the satisfaction of monetary incentives moderator. The distance was calculated by subtracting regres-sion coefficient (-.3079) from the upper boundary of the confidence interval (.2408) resulting in -. 5487. The average distance was calculated to be M= .5893 by simply adding already calculated dis-tances of both interactions and dividing it by 2. Then it was checked if confidence intervals of the two interaction effects overlap more than 50% by adding the mean value (.5893) to the lower boundary of flexible workplace interaction confidence interval score (-.6253), which gave an
out-Table 1
Confidence interval boundaries and regression coefficients needed for the analysis
Regression coefficient Lower boundary of CI Upper boundary of CI Flexible workplace interaction .0046 -.6253 .6346 Satisfaction of monetary incentives interaction -.3079 -.8566 .2408
come equal to -.036. This number is obviously lower than the upper boundary of the other interac-tion’s (with the satisfaction of monetary incentives moderator) confidence interval (.2408) hence it was concluded that the interaction effects were not significantly different from one another and the hypothesis H4b had to be rejected.
Conclusion
The main aim of this research was to provide insights that can successfully help companies manage turnover rates. Employees’ turnover may vary depending on the sector, however, in this pa-per, the unwanted voluntary turnover of highly skilled workers is addressed since it is perceived as costly and harmful to an organization’s performance. The millennial generation is about to become the largest working force in labor markets and they are also believed to be the generation that sees frequent job-quitting as a possible way to accelerate their careers. Therefore, to understand the turnover intentions of the younger employees it is necessary to analyze Millennial distinctions from other generations in terms of values, attitudes, lifestyle, and preferences. However, the majority of studies on Millennials are based in Western cultures, such as Western Europe, the US, Australia or Canada leaving out Eastern cultures, for example, ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. Dif-ferent cultural heritage, as well as diverse economic development and historical circumstances, have a significant influence on how young people approach attributes to their workplace in Western and Eastern Europe. For this particular reason, this study was focused on Millennial employees in two different European regions and it was questioned to what extent conditions like the satisfaction of organizational monetary incentives and flexible workplace arrangements might have a variating impact on employees’ workplace turnover intentions between Millennial employees in Western and Eastern Europe.
After the analysis, it was concluded that Millennial workers in Eastern Europe were indeed more likely to have workplace turnover intentions than workers in Western Europe. This signifies
that turnover rates vary across Europe as well as the fact that Eastern Europeans are less satisfied with their jobs than people in Western Europe. It was also concluded that satisfaction of salary, bonuses, and compensations in this study was the strongest predictor for employee turnover, hence explanations for more turnover intentions among Eastern Europeans are grounded in different so-cio-economical development circumstances in the region. Turnover can be caused by reasons that are not always feasible for organization’s management teams to overcome, such as countries GDP levels or national life satisfaction rates, and yet there are several causes that can be tackled. People tend to work longer hours and get lower salaries in Eastern Europe which is highly related to lower job satisfaction levels (Torgler, 2011; Sousa-Poza & Henneberger, 2004; OECD, 2016a) which may increase their turnover intentions. In this case, managers should make sure that there is enough workforce in the organization, so employees would not have to work overtime and be able to main-tain work-life balance. As well, Eastern part of Europe is hindering in the implementation of fringe benefits, such as granting more flexible working schedules for employees (OECD, 2016b), which can improve job satisfaction as well as help to deal with overwhelming workloads for the whole team. To add, turnover intentions might be higher because of the shortage of feedback and meaning-fulness in the workplace (Torgler, 2011) which is a prerogative of the leadership. In Eastern Europe, leadership styles deviate from the ones in the West in regards to the means of motivating employees (Torgler, 2011; Ardichvili & Kuchinke, 2002). Leaders in Eastern Europe put emphasis only on monetary motivations, like bonuses, and pay less attention to non-monetary incentives. It is very likely that the best motivation strategy for employees would be the combination of financial motiva-tions and fringe benefits, but the further research on this topic is needed.
One of the surprising findings of the study that did not fall in line with the previous research was that workplace flexibility had no influence on turnover intentions of the Millennials employees. This indicates that Millennials are giving the preference to financial attributes of the workplace rather than to more flexible conditions. There are several explanations to that. Firstly, it was
as-sumed that more flexible workplaces are offered in Western Europe, but the sub-sample of Western European respondents was quite small (n=29), hence it could have been the case that indeed West-ern European employees have wider access to flexible arrangements, but the sample was too small to capture that. For the same reason, the interaction effect between flexible working arrangements and employee type might have turned out insignificant in this study. Secondly, it would be naive to believe that the implementation of flexible workplaces would appear in every company. As the pre-vious research stated, there are myths around this concept that may hinder workplaces becoming more agile. The idea of managing employees working on different schedules is sometimes per-ceived as inefficient and costly (Kossek, Barber & Deborah Winters, 1999), hence companies put administrative barrier around the flexible working policy so employees would have to give notice in advance and provide justifications when working in different hours or locations (Putman, Myers & Gailliard, 2014). In this case, there can be opportunities for workers to work more flexible, howev-er, using those might cause more stress than comfort. For this reason, the replication of this research with more respondents would be valuable in order to test the impact of flex-work on turnover inten-tions more thoroughly.
Discussion
This study is valuable in several ways. For academia, it certainly contributes to the field of growing research about the Millennial employees in ex-communist block countries and their deviat-ing perspectives towards workplace and job attributes. The future studies on Millennials should es-tablish the notion that not all Millennials are the same since the historical, socio-economical and cultural background that shapes generations vary across regions. This study should help researchers and consultants avoid vast generalizations when talking about Millennial employees and not make business advice for Eastern European companies according to practices in Western Europe. More-over, since the study concluded that Eastern Europeans have more turnover intentions than Western
Europeans, it may as well signalize that overall job-satisfaction levels in Eastern Europe are lower which can be one of the explanations of workforce migration across Europe and could be analyzed in the future research.
Talking about managerial implications, a few can be named. As the paper introduces the threats the unwanted turnover may cause, leaders should take into account the turnover rates in their organization since it can signal inner problems. There is a simple method to investigate if the
turnover is becoming harmful to overall corporate performance. Firstly, it is needed to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary workplace quitting according to the reasons for leaving. Then, the percentage of turnover can be calculated by dividing the number of quitting employees by the total number of workers in the company and multiplied this number from 100 in order to get a per-centage. Previous studies indicated that up to 10% turnover might be beneficial to organizations since the new workforce refreshes the corporate climate (Shaw, 2011), so this number can be taken as a threshold. Following this, in this research it was pointed out that the turnover intentions are re-lated to satisfaction of monetary gains, however, not every employer is able to give workers a raise to prevent them from leaving. In this case, leaders could compensate in creating pleasant working environments that would benefit workers well-being but as well would challenge them enough to experience personal growth. It was already mentioned that workload management is needed in or-der to avoid overtime working. As well, managers should pay attention to their leaor-dership styles and make sure they give their employees enough feedback on their performance. Mentoring programs when senior workers have a group of other employees they give constant feedback to could be ben-eficial in this case.
Strengths and limitations
One of the strengths of the study is the fact that the study takes into account Millennials not only in Western cultures but in ex-communist countries as well. This provides a more comprehen-sive
understanding of the whole Millennial as a concept and contributes to the generational theory in general. Secondly, from a methodological viewpoint, all scales that were used in the analysis were highly reliable, hence it measured all the variables right which contributed to the analysis’s validity.
Some limitations of this study also have to be introduced and addressed in future research. Firstly, the sample size was quite small. 79 respondents allowed to conduct statistical analysis, however, it is hard to draw more generalized insights or conclusions for a broader population. As well, groups of Eastern and Western Europeans were not exactly equal and Western Europeans group appeared to be quite small which might have been the case for insignificant interaction ef-fects. As well, the majority of the sample came from two major countries, namely the Netherlands and Lithuania which makes it as well hard to do generalizations region-wise, hence future research should consider involving more respondents from different countries in both regions. Due to re-stricted time and costs of this project, the sampling method was chosen to be convenient sampling and snowball sampling. Both methods are non-random ones, which poses a threat to study’s exter-nal validity. Furthermore, future studies may consider structuring sample differently by taking not only highly educated, skilled professional workers, but as well so-called blue workers and test if there are differences among blue-workers Millennials employees between European regions. As well, it would be insightful to look deeper into younger generation differences not only in the West-ern and EastWest-ern Europe but as well in Scandinavia and the South part of Europe. This may poten-tially benefit generational theory as well as bring the more substantial understanding of Millennial employees in Europe in general.
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Appendix A: Note to the respondent before the survey
Dear respondent,
This study is conducted under the auspices of the Graduate School of Communication, a part of the University of Amsterdam. The research is about the turnover intentions of Millennial employees and incentives to retain them. In this online survey, a series of questions will be asked. It takes around 10 minutes to answer the whole questionnaire.
As this research is being carried out under the responsibility of the ASCoR, University of Amster-dam, we can guarantee that:
1) Your anonymity will be safeguarded, and that your personal information will not be passed on to third parties under any conditions unless you first give your express permission for this.
2) You can refuse to participate in the research or cut short your participation without having to give a reason for doing so. You also have up to 24 hours after participating to withdraw your permission to allow your answers or data to be used in the research.
3) Participating in the research will not entail your being subjected to any appreciable risk or dis-comfort, the researchers will not deliberately mislead you, and you will not be exposed to any explicitly offensive material.
For more information about the research and the invitation to participate, you are welcome to con-tact the project leader Elena Gečaitė; elena.gecaite@student.uva.nl, +37063126722.
Should you have any complaints or comments about the course of the research and the procedures it involves as a consequence of your participation in this research, you can contact the designated member of the Ethics Committee representing ASCoR, at the following address: ASCoR Sec-retariat, Ethics Committee, University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15793, 1001 NG Amsterdam; 020-525 3680; ascor-secr-fmg@uva.nl. Any complaints or comments will be treated in the strictest confidence.
Thank you for your interest in this research project, your assistance is greatly appreciated.
Kind regards, Elena Gečaitė MSc Communication Science Graduate School of Communication University of Amsterdam
I hereby declare that I have been informed in a clear manner about the nature and method of the re-search, as described previously.
I agree, fully and voluntarily, to participate in this research study. With this, I retain the right to withdraw my consent, without having to give a reason for doing so. I am aware that I may halt my participation in the experiment at any time.
If my research results are used in scientific publications or are made public in another way, this will be done such a way that my anonymity is completely safeguarded. My personal data or computer’s IP address will not be stored or passed on to third parties without my express permission.
If I wish to receive more information about the research, either now or in future, I can contact ele-na.gecaite@student.uva.nl; +37063126722.
Should I have any complaints about this research, I can contact the designated member of the Ethics Committee representing the ASCoR, at the following address: ASCoR secretariat, Ethics Commit-tee, University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15793, 1001 NG Amsterdam; 020-525 3680; ascor-secr-fmg@uva.nl.
________________________________________________________________________________
I understand the text presented above and I agree to participate in this study. I do not want to participate.
Appendix B: Survey questions
Q1. What is your age? (Options provided)
Q2. What is your gender? (Options provided)
Q3. What is the highest education you have obtained? (Options provided)
Q4. What is the country where you currently work? (Options provided)
Q5. How many hours per week do you work? (Open question)
Q6. Indicate your current occupation. (Open question)
______ _________________________________________________________________________
The following statements are related to the financial benefits of the workplace. Please indicate at what level do you agree with the statement:
Answer options:
(1) Totally disagree; (2) Disagree; (3) Disagree a little; (4) Neither agree nor disagree; (5) Agree a little; (6) Agree; (7) Totally agree.
Q7. The manner in which I am compensated ensures that I am motivated to give the fullest effort possible.
