An Empirical Study on Psychological Mechanism of Impact of Civil Servants’ Job Stress on Turnover Intention--the Chain Mediating Effect based on Job Satisfaction and Job Seeking Behavior

Abstract

Since 2012, Chinese Government has successively promulgated the "Eight Regulations" and other measures to standardize the behavior of civil servants. On June 1, 2019, the Revised Civil Service Law of the People's Republic of China came into force to further strengthen and standardize the management of civil servants. From the perspective of civil servants, the requirements of social development on the job of civil servants are becoming stricter and more detailed. Under the background civil servants are strongly aware of "it is not easy to be an official" and increasing job stress, and some civil servants feel "physically and mentally exhausted". Excessive job stress has brought many troubles to civil servants, such as harm to physical and mental health, affecting work progress and so on, and make a few civil servants have turnover intention or even resign. In this context, this paper analyzes the impact of civil servants' job stress on turnover intention through empirical research. Taking 349 civil servants in Yunnan province of PRC as an example, taking job stress as independent variable, job satisfaction and job seeking behavior as the chain intermediary variable, and turnover intention as the dependent variable, this paper constructs the psychological mechanism model of civil servants' job stress affecting turnover intention. SPSS and AMOS software are used to conduct an empirical study on the impact of job stress on turnover intention of civil servants in Yunnan Province. The results show that four dimensions of job stress of civil servants in Yunnan Province: Role conflict has a significant positive impact on turnover intention (0.101, P<0.05), the other three dimensions of job stress are rejected for P value was not significant. Four dimensions of job stress have a significant negative impact on job satisfaction. Job satisfaction has a significant negative impact on turnover intention. Job satisfaction plays a mediating role between role ambiguity, role conflict, workload, resource scarcity and turnover intention. The chain mediating effect of job seeking behavior on four dimensions have been verified. It is a significant positive impact that role ambiguity, role conflict, workload and resource scarcity affect job seeking behavior through job satisfaction, then ultimately affect turnover intention. The job stress of civil servants in Yunnan Province is basically at a little high level. And the distribution of total effect of job stress from large to small is workload, resource Scarcity, roleconflict and role ambiguity. From the perspective of the influence of job stress dimensions on turnover intention, whether direct, indirect or total effects, the role conflict and workload of civil servants in Yunnan province have great influence on turnover intention. On the one hand, it is of great significance to analyze the influence of job stress on civil servants' turnover intention to resign. On the other hand, this paper verifies the chain mediating effect of job satisfaction and job seeking behavior on the relationship between job stress and turnover intention of civil servants in Yunnan Province. In addition, it plays an important role in reducing the mental stress of civil servants, improving their job satisfaction and cutting down their turnover intention. However, the turnover data of civil servants collected in this paper is not enough systematic, and the factors that may adjust job stress, such as social support and public service motivation, are not verified, which will be the direction of further research.