Purpose: Shortages of the nursing workforce in the healthcare industries have been a persistent global phenomenon and worse during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores the relationship between job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention among nurses in Malaysia. As a result, affective, continuance, and normative commitment depicted a significant positive effect, while job satisfaction shows no negative effect on turnover intention. In addition, low wages, excessive non-nursing tasks workload, non-conducive work conditions, and managers’ inefficiency in governing the nursing staff also moderated the nurses’ turnover intention. The study’s outcomes serve to inform hospital managers and policymakers to employ effective measures for nurses’ retention strategies to combat the unending shortage of nursing workforce in Malaysia and across the globe. Limitations and future research are discussed.
Design/methodology/approach: This quantitative study adopted an analytical cross-sectional research design to gather data from 284 registered nurses using a Google eForm. The collected data were analyzed using Jeffreys’s Amazing Statistics Program, version 0.17.1 (JASP 0.17.1).Findings: The results indicated that turnover intention, affective commitment, continuance commitment, and normative commitment have a positive relationship with the nurses’ turnover intention in Malaysia. On a positive note, this study also shed new light compared to the traditional finding in the relation between job satisfaction and turnover intention, because it was noted that instead of depicting a negative relationship between these two variables as reported in the previous studies, it was rather the opposite result. This signifies that, based on the findings, the nurses in Malaysia manifested a high rate of job satisfaction.Originality/value: This study focuses on variables and factors that could enhance the nursing retention strategy for the nursing workforce in Malaysia. The data was collected from registered nurses working in the country and studying at the Open University of Malaysia.
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