The mediating effect of social and economic exchange behaviours in the relationship between organizational citizenship behaviours and the intention to quit in airline pilots: a research on turkish airline organizations

In the 1970s, the aviation sector, which gradually became competitive under the name of deregulation in the United States and later in Europe as liberalization, restricted its expenses in order to meet its decreasing revenues. Personnel and fuel costs emerge as the top two expenses of this sector. The unexpected increase in the number of aircrafts together with the laws and the new airline companies entering the market have revealed the personnel deficit and caused the personnel salaries to be differentiated in cost reduction. Although the salary increase is an option to keep the airline pilots on the route as the highest personnel expense revealed in the studies, with the help of international agreements, pilots can find jobs in different countries, which cause airline companies to be in a difficult situation. The high labour turnover rate in pilots is a problem for many airline companies. Observing organizational citizenship behaviours can prevent and / or reduce the high turnover rate. However, it is believed that defining social and economic change behaviours will allow to understand whether organizational citizenship behaviours will increase or not, and social exchange behaviours will have a mediating role in less labour force turnover intention. Therefore, defining social and economic behaviours and understanding the mediating role between organizational citizenship behaviour and intention to quit is important for airline companies to avoid high turnover rates. In the literature about the intention to quit, it has been argued that the numerical awareness of those who have this intention can enable the enterprise to develop strategies that will minimize the losses caused by the high labour turnover ratio. In addition to that, it has been argued that employees with high organizational citizenship behaviour have high commitment to the business and a low intention to quit. In the field of social and economic change, the supporters of social and economic change theory argue that the individual's pro-social behaviour exchange will increase the organizational citizenship behaviours towards the organization; however, they argued that those who display economic exchange behaviour will exhibit less organizational citizenship behaviours. In this study, it was investigated whether social and economic change behaviours have a mediating effect on organizational citizenship behaviours and intention to quit, as well as checking whether there is a significant link between organizational citizenship behaviours and intention to quit. In this context, it is aimed to test the validity of the model in the light of the data to be obtained from the airline pilots through a survey with the literature review and the model created. In the literature, there are many behavioural studies investigating the relationship between social and economic change and organizational citizenship behaviours, organizational citizenship behaviours and intention to quit. Many researches in the field of education, health and hospitality stand out, but there is no research in the field of aviation. The aim of this study is to contribute to behavioural research and to contribute to the literature by bringing new explanations to the behaviours of airline pilots who are few in number.