The impact of personal resources on turnover intention

Purpose This paper aims to investigate mediating effects of employees’ work engagement in the relationships between their personal resources (i.e. self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem and optimism) and turnover intention within Korean organizations. Design/methodology/approach A total of 571 survey responses collected from Korean organizations were utilized and analyzed to test the proposed research hypotheses by using structural equation modeling. Findings The results showed that all of personal resources had a positive impact on work engagement and work engagement had a negative impact on turnover intention. The results also revealed that although both organizational-based self-esteem and optimism had a negative impact on turnover intention, self-efficacy had an impact on turnover intention with the opposite way. In addition, work engagement mediated the relationships among self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem, optimism and turnover intention. Practical implications The findings of the study could suggest practical implications when human resource development (HRD) professionals consider appropriate human resource interventions (e.g. training intervention) as to how to create and maintain a working environment where employees are facilitated and learned to have high levels of personal resources (i.e. self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem and optimism), which leads to enhancing employees’ work engagement and positive outcomes (e.g. lower turnover intention). Originality/value Given that little research effort has been made to investigate the relationships among personal resources (i.e. self-efficacy, organizational-based self-esteem and optimism), work engagement and turnover intention, this research contributes to the HRD literature by adding empirical evidence of the relationships in the context of Korean organizations.