The Effect of Employee Empowerment and Power Distance on the Intention to Leave the Job and Workplace Loneliness: Gönen Thermal Sample

Abstract

Finding well-qualified employees and keeping them in business is a very crucial issue in human resources management of companies. It is considered that the concepts of personnel empowerment and power distance, which have a negative impact on productivity and motivation of personnel in workplace, cause the staff to feel workplace loneliness, and with the influence of this, it might affect their intention to quit. This study aims to investigate the effects of the perceived power distance of employee employed in thermal hotel businesses as well as personnel empowerment activities implemented by these businesses on workplace loneliness and intention to leave the job. In this study, a survey was conducted on 205 employees of thermal hotel establishments operating in Gönen district of Balıkesir province. Descriptive statistics, reliability and validity analyses, confirmatory factor analysis, hypothesis tests, and structural equation modeling were employed to test the relationships between the variables. The results of the study indicated that there was a significant and positive relationship between workplace loneliness and intention to leave the job. Moreover, a negative relationship was found between employee empowerment and intention to leave the job. Another significant positive relationship was found between workplace loneliness and perceived power distance. As a final remark, power distance was not found to be statistically affecting quitting, in a similar way, employee empowerment did not significantly affect the perceived power distance.