Journal of Air Transport Management 12 (2006) 274–276 Short report Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and flight attendants’ turnover intentions: A note Ching-Fu Chen Department of Tourism Management, Nan Hua University, 32, Chung Keng, Dalin, ChiaYi 622, Taiwan Abstract This study looks at the effects of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and individual factors on flight attendants’ turnover intentions. It makes use of samples of the attendants from a Taiwanese airline company. From the results of a logistic regression analysis, two aspects of organizational commitment (i.e. normative commitment and continuance commitment) as well as job-itself satisfaction were found significantly negative impact on flight attendants’ turnover intentions. In addition, wage and martial status were found to be significant predictors of turnover intentions. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Job satisfaction; Organizational commitment; Labor turnover intention; Flight attendants 1. Introduction The cost of turnover to organizations can be high. Given its service-intensive nature, and its relatively high labor costs in overall costs, turnover is an important issue for the airline industry. Flight attendants serving as frontline employees play a critical role in directly delivering flight service to as well as interacting with passengers. The airlines in general invest significant resources in the training of their flight attendants, seeking to maximize the quality of in-cabin service delivery. Due to high work stress and an unstable working environment, the turnover of flight attendants is an important issue from a practical. Surprisingly, however, this subject has tended to be neglected in the literature. Among various antecedents, job satisfaction and organizational commitment appear to be good predictors of turnover rates, and these are the factors investigated here together with the individual characteristics of flight attendants. 2. Previous work Job satisfaction relates to an attitude toward a job. Organizational commitment represents more of how employees feel toward the company or organization. In other words, job satisfaction represents an effective response to specific aspects of the job, whereas organiza- tional commitment is an effective response to the whole organization (Williams and Hazer, 1986). In terms of their relative contributions to the turnover process, there are three main theoretical perspectives; i.e. the satisfaction-to- commitment-mediation model, the commitment-to-satis- faction-mediation model, and the independent-effects model (Tett and Meyer, 1993). The satisfaction-to-commitment-mediation model pos- tulates that organizational commitment develops from job satisfaction, such that commitment mediates the effects of satisfaction on turnover variables. The commitment-to- satisfaction-mediation model posits that organizational commitment engenders a positive attitude toward the job and employee’s turnover behavior depends upon the employee job satisfaction level. The independent-effects model holds that both job satisfaction and organizational commitment contribute independently to the turnover process. It hypothesizes that job satisfaction and organiza- tional commitment, though related, are distinct constructs implying no particular causality relationship between them. In addition to job satisfaction and organizational commitment, several factors have been also used to examine their contributions to turnover. These factors ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/jairtraman 0969-6997/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2006.05.001 E-mail address: cfchen@mail.nhu.edu.tw.