HR Practices and Employee Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction and Moderating Role of Perceived Organizational Support in Afghanistan’s Banking Sector

Abstract

This paper examines how human resource (HR) practices can affect employee turnover intention in the Afghan banking sector, which is a post-conflict economy featuring acute economic instability and institutional instability. Based on the Social Exchange Theory and Job Demands-Resources model and Organizational Support Theory, a moderated mediation model was measured through cross-sectional survey data of 180 full-time employees in six large Kabul-based private banks. The HR practices studied included recruitment and selection, training and development, compensation and rewards, and job satisfaction as the mediator with perceived organizational support (POS) as the moderator. The SPSS and Hayes PROCESS macro results showed that HR practices significantly directly and negatively related turnover intention and positively related job satisfaction. The job satisfaction was a significant predictor of reduced turnover intention and mediated the HR-turnover intention relationship, which accounted more than half the total effect. As opposed to the hypothesis, POS did not significantly mediate the satisfaction-turnover intention relationship, which means that the buffering effect of organizational support has a boundary condition in the extreme survival-mode environments. The research confirms the chain of HR-satisfaction-retention and demonstrates that in the case of acute scarcity and uncertainty, the basic job satisfaction and the provision of foundational resources are more important than the conditional impact of socio-emotional buffers. These results expand turnover theory to the fragile states and show a chain of importance of retention mechanisms and optimize OST applicability. In practice, the findings recommend two-phase retention plan, on the one hand, to protect the integrity of compensation to ensure the foundational exchange, and on the other hand, to institutionalize satisfaction monitoring in order to ride on the affective pathway. As a macroeconomic issue of concern, human capital maintenance in banking comes out as a concern to policymakers.

Keywords: HR practices, turnover intention, job satisfaction, perceived organizational support, fragile state, Afghanistan