Pay satisfaction, organisational commitment, voluntary turnover intention, and attitudes to money in a South African context.

The present study explored the relationships between pay satisfaction, affective organisational commitment, voluntary turnover intention, and attitudes to money in a South African context, as well as whether attitudes to money acted as a moderator and affective organisational commitment as a mediator in the relationship between pay satisfaction and voluntary turnover intention. All participants received a web link to an online survey host in which a questionnaire was presented. The questionnaire included a self-constructed demographic questionnaire, the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire (Heneman & Schwab, 1985), the Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979), an adapted six-item questionnaire assessing voluntary turnover intention, and the Money Ethics Scale (Tang, 1992). The final sample (n = 190) consisted of respondents from a corporate company, as well as a snowball sample from social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). \nThe results suggested that pay satisfaction may best be viewed as a multi-dimensional construct both internationally and within a South African context. The study provides further support that this is robust across different types of samples and contexts and in different organisational fields. Furthermore, pay satisfaction was positively related to affective organisational commitment and negatively related to voluntary turnover intention. Voluntary turnover intention was also significantly and very strongly negatively related to affective organisational commitment. Moreover, affective organisational commitment mediated the relationship between pay satisfaction and voluntary turnover intention. This supported international findings regarding these relationships. \nAlthough one of the subscales of pay satisfaction, pay benefits, was significantly and negatively related to ‘good’ attitude to money, overall pay satisfaction and the other subscales did not significantly relate to money being seen as ‘good’. Pay satisfaction and all its subscales were also not related to money being seen as ‘evil’, an ‘achievement’, ‘respect’ for money, ‘budget’, ‘freedom’, or overall attitude to money. Furthermore, overall attitude to money and all of the subscales were not significantly related to either organisational commitment or voluntary turnover intention. In addition, further analyses found no moderating effect for attitudes to money in terms of the relationship between pay satisfaction and voluntary turnover intention. These results were unexpected given the limited theory available and further research is required.