What drives pharmacists’ turnover intention: A systematic review

BACKGROUND: Pharmacist turnover can negatively impact not only on work efficiency, organizational performance, work productivity and customer satisfaction, but also on the quality of pharmaceutical services and patient safety. Turnover intention is a core antecedent of turnover. Turnover intention of the pharmacists is affected by many factors related to their organization or job. OBJECTIVE: To elaborate the factors affecting the pharmacists’ turnover intention and their associations. Studies related to any factors affecting pharmacists’ turnover intention in all pharmacy settings were included. The QualSyst assessment tool was used for assessing the quality of the included studies. RESULT: For this systematic review, 3,822 studies were identified. Of these studies,20 studies were included. Thirty factors were explored and a model for pharmacists’ turnover intention was produced. Organizational commitment, job satisfaction, career commitment, job stress, perceived organizational support, and work climate were frequently found as drivers to pharmacist turnover intention. Some of 24 other factors had both direct and indirect effects on pharmacist turnover intention via organizational commitment, job satisfaction, career commitment, job stress, and perceived organizational support. Many studies have reported that organizational commitment and job satisfaction had significant influence on pharmacist turnover intention in all settings. Job stress and work climate had direct and indirect effects on turnover intention of hospital pharmacists. Career commitment and perceived organizational support had direct and indirect effects on community pharmacist turnover intention. CONCLUSION: The factors driving the turnover intention of the pharmacists in different pharmacy practices were different. It indicated that the further interventions should be different to improve the pharmacists’ retention in each pharmacy practice setting. Our systematic review is beneficial to guide human resource management in pharmacy and useful for guiding the conceptual framework of future research studies.