The influence of job stress towards turnover intention among generation Y employees in Perak Information Technology (IT) industry

Abstract

Researchers have been studying turnover intention for nearly a century. Recently, most generation Y workforce in Malaysia's Information Technology (IT) industry reportedly developed a norm of switching jobs constantly due to being increasingly exposed to a lot of work-related stressors. This study aims to investigate the relationship between job stress and turnover intention among generation Y employees in the Perak IT industry. The quantitative approach was used by distributing online questionnaires through the Facebook platform to collect data from a sample of 123 employees drawn from IT companies in Perak, Malaysia. The result revealed that the majority of the respondents are recorded with a high level of job stress and a moderate level of turnover intention. It was found that job stress was significantly positively correlated with turnover intention. Further analysis also demonstrated that the dimensions of job stress such as work overload and work ambiguity were significant influences on turnover intention. Overall, there was a statistically significant positive relationship between job stress and turnover intention among the employees. The findings of this study demonstrated important implications for IT organisations, employees, and Human Resource (HR) practitioners by allowing them to understand the devastating effects of job stress and equip themselves with strategies to reduce turnover rates.