Leadership style and employee turnover intentions: a social identity perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to study how an approach of culturally‐specific human resource management (HRM) should moderate the relationship between leadership style and employee turnover.Design/methodology/approach – Questionnaire data were collected from firms in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The subjects are 190 leader/member dyads (111 (58 percent) were from mainland China (i.e. Shenzhen), and 79 (42 percent) were from Hong Kong). Hierarchical regression model is adopted to test the hypotheses.Findings – Collecting empirical data from firms in different regions of China, it was found that a leadership style, i.e. leader‐member exchange (LMX), can have a significant effect on employee turnover. Moreover, the effect of LMX can be moderated by the C‐HRM‐oriented HRM (C‐HRM) approach. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings to academic researchers and practitioners. There exist both the direct effect and interactive effect of LMX on employees' organization id...