Psychometric properties of the Intentions to Leave the Organization Scale (ILOS): a cross-cultural study

Abstract

The focus of the present study is to introduce into organizational researches a new psychometric scale that identifies the intention of an employee to leave the company he works for, based only on external and internal aspects to the organization (e.g. payroll, work and life balance); aspects that could stimulate a person to leave or remain in his/her current job. The Intention to Leave the Organization Scale (ILOS) was built with 31 items, using the Likert Scale model, ranging from 1 – Totally Disagree – to 6 – Totally Agree. All items of the ILOS referred to conditions that would influence the decision of an employee to leave his current organization, as for example, “I would move to another company if it was significantly larger than my current organization”. The instrument was distributed to 146 business employees of a same international company in the automotive field, located in over 46 countries. Participants were chosen randomly, despite their age, gender, business function or location. To be able to get to all participants, the questionnaire was introduced into an online platform – Google Docs - that enabled all answers to arrive anonymously and on time. The results were parted into five bigger groups of participants, based on other cross-cultural studies conducted in the organizational field. Those studies indicated a strong consistency between the cultural values of countries located in five main regions: Americas, Europe, Eastern-Europe, Africa and Asia. The reliability and validity of the scale were tested and approved, making the instrument a valid and useful tool for future researches. Beyond the possibility of using the ILOS as an organizational and academic instrument, the results acquired in this study can also be analyzed and used in future researches, especially the ones that are willing to make a comparison of the intention of an employee to leave his organization, cultural aspects he is surrounded, and the local labor market or economic situation.