Uncovering the Turnover Intention of Proactive Employees: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement and the Moderated Mediating Role of Job Autonomy

Retaining proactive employees with the potential to be high performers is recognized as an essential condition for an organization’s survival and prosperity. However, few studies have logically explained and empirically clarified the link between proactive personality, which represents a distal proactive tendency, and turnover intention to predict actual turnover behavior. With the research objective to address these research gaps, we expected that work engagement as a proximal motivational mechanism was likely to mediate the relationship between proactive personality and turnover intention, and that job autonomy as a critical job context was likely to moderate the relationship between proactive personality and work engagement. We developed a moderated mediation model incorporating these expectations. The results of the survey conducted on employees working for mid-sized manufacturing firms in Korea were consistent with our expectations. The findings of this study help uncover the intentions of turnover exhibited by proactive employees.