ILR Impact Brief - Affective Commitment Links Human Resource Practices and Voluntary Turnover

[Excerpt] Motivation- and empowerment- enhancing human resource (HR) practices are positively associated with employees’ collective emotional attachment to, and identification with, a company and its goals; this affective commitment, in turn, is negatively associated with the aggregate of employee decisions to exit an organization. Thus, collective affective commitment mediates the relationship between these two sets of HR practices and voluntary turnover. Practices that enhance workforce skills, however, are not mediated by collective affective commitment; rather, they are directly and positively associated with increased voluntary turnover