13 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL MANAGEMENT JANUARY 2011. VOLUME 1. NUMBER 1 WHAT MADE THEY GO? Zafir Mohd Makhbul and Mohd Radzuan Rahid Faculty of Economics and Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Fazilah Mohamad Hasun Faculty of Management and Muamalah, Kolej Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Selangor ABSTRACT Employee turnover brings many negative consequences to the organizations and intention to quit is a manifestation of the actual turnover. From previous studies, it is the output of many factors like job satisfaction, interpersonal relationship, organizational culture, and workplace stress. Even though many studies have been carried out to investigate the factors associate to employees’ intention to quit, none of them has made comparison between private and public sector employees. The current study has two- fold objectives i.e. investigating and comparing the factors influencing public and private sectors employees’ intention to quit. The population of this study is 1,056,410.6 million support staff and 1,668 were selected as the sample. The data for this research were obtained by administrating a Likert -scaled Malay language questionnaire. From the analysis, majority of them were female and have worked with the organizations for 3 – 5 years. The correlation analysis proved that the intention to quit among the workers is negatively correlated with the psychology dimension and it is not associated with the physiology dimension. T-test analysis confirms that there is significant difference in the factors influencing the intention to quit among public and private sectors’ employees. This study used only blue collar workers as its sample. Thus, future research should seek to address this limitation by using white collar workers as the sample. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.0 INTRODUCTION Employee turnover has been an important issue that spurs many negative consequences to the organizations such as tarnished image, high cost due to re-staffing, re-training and other re- (Siong, Mellor, Moore, & Firth, 2006; Sutherland, 2002), and declining productivity (Bigliardi, Petroni, & Dormio, 2005). There are countless studies done to investigate the factors motivating employees to leave organizations voluntarily and most of the studies relate intention to quit to job satisfaction (e.g. Park & Kim, 2009; Cohen & Golan, 2007; Siong et al., 2006; Poon, 2004; Elangovan, 2001), interpersonal relationship (Bigliardi et al., 2005; Firth, Mellor, Moore, & Loquet, 2004), organizat ional culture (Park & Kim, 2009; Carmeli, 2005) and workplace stress (Bhanugopan & Fish, 2006; Jaramillo, Mulki, & Locander, 2006; Siong et al., 2006; Elangovan, 2001). Intention to quit is a manifestation of the actual turnover. It is used as a predictor to the action of real turnover because the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) suggests that behavioral intention is a good predictor of an actual action. Even though many studies have been undertaken to investigate the