Impact of leader-member exchange, communication, and corporate social responsibility on employee performance and turnover intention : a case study of True Corporation Public Company Limited

Abstract

During this digital disruption era, many organizations have to prepare themselves to be ready for coping with all the changes. One of the approaches that many organizations choose to perform is to create workforce flexibility by recruiting employees as short-term contract. The other approach is to replace some jobs that are currently performed by human with automation or robot. Anyway, many research papers found that jobs that will continue being performed by human are those jobs that require human skill, for example customer service or sales representative etc. In addition to this, many research papers also found that majority of the future labor force tends to prefer short-term contract employment to long-term permanent contract. Altogether, many organizations are facing with the challenge of attracting and retaining labor force with them, especially the short-term contract-based labor force who are working on the jobs that require human skill. Moreover, besides attracting and retaining the short-term contract-based employees with the organization, driving those employees to deliver high performance results is also important.

There are three objectives of conducting this research which are (1) study the relationship among leader-member exchange, corporate social responsibility, communication job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee performance, and turnover intention (2) modeling the relationship of leader-member exchange, corporate social responsibility, communication, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee performance, and turnover intention and (3) study the format and practical guidelines for communication, leader-member exchange and corporate social responsibility.

True Corporation Public Company Limited, including both office in Bangkok location and office in Khon Kaen location, was selected for conducting this research study. Sample population are short-term contract-based employees who are working in telemarketing department, of which the job scope is about selling all products of True Corporation Public Company Limited. This research was conducted by using mixed method methodology. After constructing the conceptual framework from reviewing related literatures, quantitative research methodology was used to study the statistical relationship among each factor. Such a statistical study was conducted by SEM (Structural Equation Model) techniques. 737 questionnaires were sent out to sample population and 679 questionnaires, which equals to 95%, were returned. After that, qualitative research was conducted by conducting the focus group interview with 20 samples. Then, data collected from both quantitative research and qualitative research was analyzed together to make conclusion and recommendation.

Based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, the result revealed that all of the three independent factors, including communication, corporate social responsibility and leader-member exchange, have indirect impact on the turnover intention and employee performance. Communication is the independent factor that has highest total impact on employee performance and can also have direct and indirect impact on employee performance as well. While corporate social responsibility is the factor that has highest total impact on turnover intention and can also have indirect impact on turnover intention through job satisfaction and organizational commitment as well.

As a result, in order to retain and drive performance of employees, organization should focus on developing and executing the practices and guidelines relating to communication and corporate social responsibility. When developing and executing the practices and guidelines for communication, types of communication that the organization should consider are direction communication, subordinate-initiated communication, sharing information communication, evaluation communication, and rationale communication. Regarding the practices and guidelines for corporate social responsibility, the organization should consider both perception of company’s corporate social responsibility program and participation in company’s corporate social responsibility program.