Conference on Business Management 2017 School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia, CUSTOMER-RELATED SOCIAL STRESSORS AND FRONTLINE EMPLOYEE TURNOVER INTENTION: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF JOB- RELATED ANXIETY Muhtari Y. Abubakar a , Kabiru Maitama Kura b a Department of Business Administration, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria Email: myabubakar@gmail.com b Department of Business Administration and Management, Federal Polytechnic Kaura Namoda, Nigeria Email: kmkura@gmail.com Abstract Theory and empirical evidence suggests that customer stressors were positively related to frontline employee turnover intention. However, little work has focused on testing why and in what way customer stressors are related to such employee attitudinal outcome. To address this knowledge gap, we developed and tested a mediation model of turnover intention. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we suggest that job-related anxiety might be a fundamental reason why customer-related stressors predicts frontline employee turnover intention. The model was tested with a sample of 258 restaurant frontline service employees. Results suggest a positive and significant relationship between customer-related stressors and employee turnover intention. Also, job-related anxiety was found to mediate the relationship between customer stressors and frontline employee turnover intention. These results highlight the importance of job-related anxiety as a fundamental mechanism which explains why and in what way customer stressors are related to frontline employee turnover intention. Keywords: Antecedents of Turnover Intention, Conservation of Resources Theory, Customer Stressors, Job-Related Anxiety, Turnover Intention INTRODUCTION In both the popular press and the scholarly literature, employee turnover has repeatedly been shown to have detrimental consequences for organizations and its members (Abubakar, Chauhan, & Kura, 2014; Oxford Economics, 2014; Sunder, Kumar, Goreczny, & Maurer, 2017; Vanderpool & Way, 2013). For example, Boles, Dudley, Onyemah, Rouziès, and Weeks (2012) reported that the direct costs associated with hiring and training a new employee have been as much as to be 200% of salary that employee who quits his or her job. It is estimated that U.S. firms spend as much as $15 billion every year to train newly salespeople and another $800 billion on incentives, and salespeople’s attrition reduces firms ‘overall return on investments (Wheeler, 2017). In Nigeria, it has been reported that banks are affected by escalating employee turnover in recent years (Aroloye, 2015). Given its detrimental consequences, gaining a thorough understanding of the underlying antecedents of employee turnover is of utmost importance in terms of minimizing such phenomenon. Several antecedents of employee turnover have been suggested by researchers in the field of marketing and organizational behaviour (Hogh, Hoel, & Carneiro, 2011; Long, Perumal, & Ajagbe, 2012; Mardanov, Maertz, & Sterrett, 2008). To date, some of the factors that have been examined include organizational culture (San Park & Kim, 2009; Way et al., 2007), job satisfaction (Castle, Engberg, Anderson, & Men, 2007; Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty, & Keiser, 2012), perceived organizational justice (Nadiri & Tanova, 2010; Ponnu & Chuah, 2010), human resource management practices (Batt & Valcour, 2003; Haines III, eISBN 978-967-0910-76-5 1088 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UUM Repository