Identification with Work Content as a Determinant of the Desire to Stay in a Job
Research on the choice to remain in a job is limited, and that which exists tends to be based on turnover models that consider that the determinants influencing the intent to remain or to leave a job are the same. Furthermore, with the exception of Cossette and Gosselin (2012), scholars have traditionally only dealt with the choice to remain within a company and have not made any distinction between variables that explain the choice of employees to remain in a particular job or to be intraorganizationally mobile. This research serves two purposes: 1- it identifies the concepts related to the desire to stay in a job; 2- it explores the interrelationships between identified variables and the desire to stay in a job. The contribution of this research is twofold: the first is theoretical in so far as we identify the variables associated with the desire to remain in a job. The findings make it possible to propose a theoretical model that describes the relationships between three groups of variables (identification, personal context, and work context) and the desire to stay. In particular, we show the likely influence of how people identify with work content upon the desire to remain in a job. Rarely taken into account in analyses on this topic, we define this influence as a condition where an employee establishes equivalence between what he/she is and what he/she does. This identification follows the success achieved by a person that attests to his/her range of skills and provides him/her with a feeling of efficacy. The person identifies with this source of pride. The second contribution of this research is methodological. It appears to be fruitful to associate interview analysis, applying the principles of grounded theory, with a statistical process, such as a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), an approach that is little known to Anglo-Saxon scholars.