African Journal of Business Management Vol. 5(5), pp. 1904-1914, 4 March, 2011 Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/AJBM ISSN 1993-8233 ©2011 Academic Journals Full Length Research Paper Perceived investment in employee development and turnover intention: A social exchange perspective Omer Farooq Malik*, Qaisar Abbas, Talat Mahmood Kiyani, Khalil-Ur-Rehman Malik and Aamer Waheed Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS, Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad – Pakistan. Accepted 2 December, 2010 Applying the social exchange theory the study aimed at exploring the relationships between perceived investment in employee development, affective commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Using a self-administered questionnaire, 177 tellers of private sector commercial banks in Pakistan were randomly selected and surveyed to test a multiple mediation model, to see if the relationship between perceived investment in employee development and turnover intention was mediated by affective commitment and job satisfaction. The causal steps method was used to assess the multiple mediation model. Results indicate that affective commitment and job satisfaction completely mediated the link between perceived investment in employee development and turnover intention. Further, the difference between the two mediated effects was not statistically significant. Implications, limitations, and future lines of research are also discussed in the paper. Key words: Perceived investment in employee development, affective commitment, job satisfaction, turnover intention, multiple mediation, Pakistan. INTRODUCTION Several studies have found that development affects employee attitudes (Saks, 1995; Bartlett, 2001; Scarpello and Campbell, 1983) and affective commitment and job satisfaction are found in several models of development outcomes (Tsui et al., 1997; Kalleberg and Rognes, 2000; Naumann, 1993; Lee and Bruvold, 2003). The mo- dels are generally based on social exchange theory and assume that, an individual seeks to reciprocate in positive ways by extending their effort to benefit the organization when he/she receives something of value. Mergers, acquisitions, re-engineering, and downsizing that are now prevalent have led to job insecurity for employees and this situation has created problems for organizations as it undermines the traditional human resource practices to retain committed employees (Benson, 2006). Several scholars advocate that ‘high commitment’ hu- man resource practices such as, employee development might supplant the traditional employee-organization *Corresponding author. E-mail: omer_farooq@comsats.edu.pk. Tel: +923009199678. relationship strategy as a basis for shaping employee attitudes and behaviors (Iles et al., 1996; Estienne, 1997; Galunic and Anderson, 2000). Employee development is a signal to employees that the organizations value their contributions and care about their employability and as a result they reciprocate in positive ways by demonstrating attitudes that commensurate with the amount of oblige- tion they feel the organization has for them (Wayne et al., 1997). Developing new skills and competencies gives employees a great sense of control over their career, as they can compete for jobs within the organization and at the same time they make themselves more valuable in external labor market if they decide to leave (Feldman, 1996). Literature review shows that, although organizational commitment and job satisfaction have shown to be important predictors of turnover intention (Addae et al., 2006; Lee, 1988), very few studies (Lee and Bruvold, 2003) have examined how job satisfaction and organiza- tional commitment are related to the link between perceived investment in employee development and turn- over intention. We believe that this study will make some important contributions to the literature. Most importantly,