THE ROLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT IN EMPLOYEE TURNOVER IN LOGISTICS ACTIVITIES OF FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN

Background: Due to challenging times caused by the global pandemic and the common dynamic reality of contemporary food supply chains, logistics employees inevitably become the most valuable resource. Companies are forced to continuously monitor and forecast employee satisfaction and possible turnover intention. The paper aims to explore the impact of organizational commitment on the turnover intention among employees in logistics organizations of food supply chain companies. While the direction of this impact is rather unquestionable, the main purpose is to determine the strength of correlation and defining the more dominant commitment aspect in shaping turnover intention.

Methods: A primary empirical study was conducted on a sample of 121 employees working on logistics activities workplaces from 5 companies in the food supply chain in Croatia. The turnover intention scale and organizational commitment scale were used to measure the effect of organizational commitment on turnover intention. For regression analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM), SPSS 21.0, and AMOS 21.0 software were used to analyze the relationship of these variables.

Results: After testing the proposed structural model and achieving the model fit, the explanation of variance in turnover intention was 43.4%, and after including the activity type and the personal monthly income as control variables, 44.5%. The strong, direct, significant, and negative influence of affective organizational commitment on employee turnover intention has been proven, while there was no significant influence of normative commitment. Control variables have improved the model, but without significant influence on turnover intention.

Conclusions: This research has filled the gap and highlighted the importance of overall organizational commitment among employees in logistics activities, emphasizing affective commitment. It was confirmed that an emotional connection with the organization is of particular importance to retain employees in the organization. Organizations’ investment in building and strengthening long-term affective commitment is time-consuming and seeks for interpersonal skills for managers, which could be neglected in logistics activities focused on flow improvement.