Organizational commitment and turnover intention for youth labor force

Organizational commitment is defined as the identification of employees with their organizations and the continuation of their tendency to remain in the organization. High organizational commitment is seen as very important for the success and continuity of the organization. Individuals' adoption of the values and aims of the organization and the feeling of being equivalent to the organization itself will enable them to work more effectively. In this context, as organizational commitment increases, continuity increases and the turnover intention decreases. In other words, there is a negative relationship between organizational commitment and turnover intention. There are many personal and organizational factors that determine the commitment of individuals to their organizations. Especially age factor is an important factor determining the individual's commitment to the organization. Accordingly, as the age of the individual increases the organizational commitment is expected to be higher. Therefore, according to this view, young people have lower organizational commitment than adults. The reasons for this are the fact that young people are in search of better jobs for the purpose of working under better conditions and the investment made for them is less. Indeed, in the young labor force, the tendency to leave is higher because the costs to be incurred are lower. On the other hand, there has been a decrease in employment of young people in recent years. The proportion of young unemployed people in Turkey also is increasing. This situation causes many problems in economic and social terms. The fact that both the youth unemployment rate is high and their organizational commitment is lower makes the subject interesting. In this study, organizational commitment and turnover intention in the young laborforce were investigated via questionnaires in a corporate firm in the retail sector. Correlation, regression analyzes were performed on the data obtained from the questionnaires and differences between the groups in terms of demographic characteristics were investigated. According to the findings, it is determined that organizational commitment is lower and turnover intention is higher in young labor force than adult labor force.