Effect of Work Life Balance and Job Stress on Turnover Intention with the Mediating Effect of Job Satisfaction: A Study of Commissioned Officers in Sri Lanka Military Forces

Abstract

Employee turnover has been an important research area in social science over the past involving the discipline of human resource management. But these types of studies in the military are very few. This paper makes use of quantitative research methods to assess the effect of work life balance and job stress as predictor variables on job satisfaction which is intervening variable towards the turnover intention as the outcome variable in the schematic diagram of the study. Data were collected from 327 Commissioned Officers of the military in Sri Lanka through a structured questionnaire and processed those data by using correlation and regression analyses. The results of the analyses indicated that the survey was reliable, and the study model is significant. Data analysis of the research study revealed that the correlations among turnover intention, job satisfaction, job stress and work life balance are highly significant. As per the regression results, both work life balance and job stress affect both job satisfaction and turnover intention of Commissioned Officers. But job satisfaction doesn’t mediate the relationships between work life balance and turnover intention as well as job stress and turnover intention. The fallouts indicated that job stress and work life balance are the determinants of the turnover intention of commissioned officers although there is no significant mediating relationship of job satisfaction between them. Based on the study, it is suggested that remedial actions should be proposed to reduce the job stress in order to mitigate the turnover intention while encouraging work life balance practices. Moreover, it is suggested that management needs to put more emphasis on improving the counselling and stress reducing aspects while enhancing working conditions to minimize the turnover intention among military officers.