The influence of training, membership and employee age on turnover intention in co-operative financial institutions

The relationship between training and turnover intention is often explained in light of social exchange theory (SET) (Benson, 2006; Flint et al., 2013; Jung & Takeuchi, 2019; Koster et al., 2011; Martini et al., 2023; Renaud et al., 2015). SET focuses on how people exchange different resources, with the most commonly analysed rule of exchange being the norm of reciprocity (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005). In the context of training, it is assumed that the opportunity to develop competencies is perceived by employees as both a benefit and an expression of the manager’s concern (Martini et al., 2023; Pajo et al., 2010). As a result of this, employees want to reciprocate by becoming more involved in their work, feeling more attached to their employer and being less willing to leave (Benson, 2006; Pajo et al., 2010). However, the evidence of such a relationship is mixed, as some authors point out that training not only does not reduce turnover or turnover intention, but actually increases these factors (see Ju & Li, 2019; Jun & Eckardt, 2023; Kampkötter & Marggraf, 2015). For this reason, Jun and Eckardt (2023) have highlighted the need to include moderators in this relationship. One such moderator may be the industry being studied, as there are significant differences in training between industries (Jones et al., 2012).

In the case of CFIs, it must be considered that they are part of the financial industry but also simultaneously are co-operative enterprises. This should affect the results of training in several ways. First, training in banking is more intensive compared to other industries (Jones et al., 2012). Second, CFIs tend to focus on long-term employment. Therefore, one can expect that, when offering training, CFIs will also take efforts to ensure that the employee does not leave the organisation too soon – for example, using a system of internal promotions (Jones et al., 2012). Third, CFIs are often locally embedded (Egarius & Roger, 2016; Fiordelisi & Mare, 2014), which should allow managers to better know their employees and tailor their training to their individual needs. In these conditions, the risk of training mismatch is quite low, and workers should report lower turnover intention as a result of receiving more intensive training – i.e., training that is more frequent or longer-lasting (Piasecki, 2021). This leads to the following hypotheses:

Ownership of employer shares is a crucial factor that may modify the relationships described above. As membership in cooperatives is voluntary and open (International Co-operative Alliance, 2015), employees may or may not be members of their CFI. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that employee-members hold shares at least partly because they are interested in the issues of their co-operative and feel attached to its values (Egarius & Roger, 2016). In this case, training is an important signal to the employee that the employer also cares about maintaining long-term relationship with them (Lawrynowicz & Piasecki, 2015). Training could thus be considered a natural element of social exchange.

Employees may also perceive membership as a way of influencing decisions made at CFIs (Jones et al., 2012). In this way, they can indirectly influence HRM-related issues (like training), and try to make it better-suited to their needs. If this succeeds, such workers should report a higher level of job satisfaction as a result of greater training intensity (Black & Gregersen, 1997). Because job satisfaction is strongly correlated with turnover intention (Bowling & Hammond, 2008), employee-members should indicate a lower level of turnover intention as a result of training compared to non-members.

On the other hand, non-members receive less training on average (Piasecki, 2021), but this means they may value each training opportunity even more. G. B. Cooke et al. (2011) indicated that employees who receive less training are also less willing to decline it when it is offered. Moreover, non-members may have fewer opportunities to receive signals of management concern than members; hence, they will be more sensitive to attending more (or more days of) training.

In summary, two competing hypotheses can be put forward:

Several authors have indicated that shares in CFIs are acquired for various reasons, not only because of a strong affective relationship with the organisation (Egarius & Roger, 2016; Jones et al., 2016; Szambelańczyk et al., 2020). It can be expected that persons holding shares for financial reasons will have a different attitude towards the organisation (and its activities, including HRM) than those who become shareholders out of a desire to build a strong local community or family tradition. Moreover, the attitudes and behaviours of shareholders (even those sharing the same motivations) may be modified by their demographic characteristics, including age, experience and educational background (Höhler & Kühl, 2018). Thus, it seems that the relationships described in the previous section may be further modified by various personal characteristics. Among those features, this article focuses on age for the reasons described in the Introduction.

In general, younger employees are more focused on learning opportunities and career development than older ones (Woodward et al., 2015). For this reason, offering them development opportunities through training should be seen as the employer’s response to their needs. According to SET, a stronger bond should be developed among all younger employees as a result (not only members or non-members). Moreover, the development of social exchange takes time (Flint et al., 2013). Therefore, young employee-members, having not yet fully experienced the benefits of membership, may not exhibit significant differences in attitude compared to non-members.

On the other hand, training in CFI is often firm-specific, including learning about specific co-operative values and principles (Bossler & Schild, 2016). This factor should have a special meaning for young non-members. The additional knowledge about co-operative values and principles should probably lead to greater changes in attitudes for young non-members, as it should help them to better understand and assimilate the specificities of working in a CFI.

Moreover, in the Polish co-operative banks studied in this article, members are mostly older (Szambelańczyk et al., 2020). Taking this into account, one may assume that compared to young non-members, those rare young employees who decide to become members manifest a higher level of attachment on average that results from their intrinsic motivation to take part in their employer’s affairs. Thus, young members have a relatively high level of social exchange and the effects of training will probably be less discernible for them than for young non-members.

At the same time, the attachment of older members is often associated with their sense of control over the co-operative, detailed knowledge of the co-operative and pride in their membership (Jussila et al., 2012). The possession of shares may sometimes be the result of multi-generational family ties to the co-operative movement (Unda, 2023) and in those cases may be treated as a source of prestige. Thus, in light of SET, one can predict that older employees will expect that their employer to sustain the mutual relationship and strengthen their conviction about their unique status, and that because participating in HRM practices might be perceived as a source of status information (e.g., Reh et al., 2022), older employee-members should pay particular attention to the training offered to them by the employer. Older non-members, who usually have had enough time to decide whether to become members during their tenure, are probably less concerned with status and, therefore, less sensitive to training.

Thus, the following two hypotheses were formulated:

The relationships between the study variables and the formulated hypotheses are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Data from a 2017 research project about HRM in Polish co-operative banks was employed to test the research hypotheses. This project covered all entities active at the time; the invitation to the survey was sent via e-mail to more than 550 banks. To increase the response rate, additional information regarding the project was announced during the annual meeting of managers of co-operative banks and spread by affiliate banks. Each bank that took part in the research received a questionnaire about personnel policy and general HR data (e.g., the number of branches and employees) with a link to the questionnaire for employees. The employee questionnaire was distributed by a representative of the bank (often an HR specialist) in two formats, containing exactly the same questions in online (and paper form if a bank indicated a need for this). The responses of 1,707 employees from 43 co-operative banks (8% of those operating at the end of 2017) were obtained in this way.

From the perspective of the research topic, it should be emphasised that employment at co-operative banks in Poland started to decrease beginning in 2013, with this trend beginnign to weaken in 2017. Moreover, the change in employment between 2017 and 2018 was marginal (Urząd Komisji Nadzoru Finansowego, 2019). Thus, 2017 can be seen as a period of (temporary) stabilisation of employment levels in Polish co-operative banks.

The dependent variable (turnover intention) was measured based on three statements from Konovsky and Cropanzano (1991) using a five-point Likert-type scale (1 = Very unlikely, 5 = Very likely). Cronbach’s α was 0.869. The example statement was as follows: “How likely is it that you will look for work outside of this bank within the next year?” The average of the three questions was calculated for further analysis.

The development of the independent variables involved several steps. The sample was restricted to include only people employed full-time, because part-time employees may have had fewer opportunities to participate in training (G. B. Cooke et al., 2011). Full-time employees accounted for 99.4% of the respondents in the sample. Contractual employees excluded from the analysis, but this only applied to one person. In addition, irregular responses related to training (e.g., employees simultaneously indicating that they did not participate in training in the previous year and that they would like to receive less training) were excluded from further analysis.

In the next step, employees who indicated “no” to the question of whether they participated in any training in the previous year were assigned a 0. Those who answered “yes” were asked the next two questions. The first question, “How many training events (courses, seminars, conferences) related to your current job and financed by the employer (apart from compulsory training [e.g., health and safety]) did you attend in 2016?” was evaluated on a scale ranging from 1 to 4 (1 = one training event, 2 = two training events, 3 = three training events, and 4 = more than three training events). The second question, “Over the last year, the number of days I spent on employer-funded training (apart from compulsory training [e.g., health and safety]) was as follows,” was evaluated on a scale ranging from 1 to 5 (1 = less than 1 day, 2 = 1–2 days, 3 = 3–4 days, 4 = 5–6 days, 5 = more than 6 days). These questions were similar to those appearing in earlier studies (e.g., Benson, 2006; Koster et al., 2011; Pajo et al., 2010).

Eventually, the dependent variables had scales of either 0–4 or 0–5. Note that the training questions did not distinguish between types of training – for example, its subject matter, or its compatibility with the respondent’s job profile. This issue will be addressed further when discussing the limitations of the study.

Both moderators were measured using a dummy variable (the exact wording for employee membership was “Do you hold shares of the co-operative bank in which you are employed?” with 1 = employee-member). Age was initially measured using several categories (below 20, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, and 60 years and above) but was later recoded (0 = less than 40 years old; 1 = 40 years or more) to facilitate further calculations and circumvent the problem of very small counts for the edge intervals. The 40-year threshold was also used in the shareholder survey conducted by Szambelańczyk et al. (2020).

Control variables included dummy variables: gender (1 = woman); position (1 = managerial); education (1 = higher education); and company size (1 = 100 or more employees). These variables have been found to influence both training intensity (G. B. Cooke et al., 2011; Grund & Martin, 2012) and turnover (Holtom et al., 2008; Mor Barak et al., 2001).

Before proceeding with the analyses, the two-level structure of the data (i.e., employees nested within organisations) was inspected. The results of this initial check indicated that there were convincing arguments for employing multilevel modelling (MLM; likelihood ratio test statistic for turnover intention = 131.37, p < 0.001, ICC = 0.15) (Leckie, 2010). Following Shen’s recommendations (2016), both variables describing training intensity were group-centred before performing the calculations, while the dummy variables and control variables were not. Several two-level linear regression models were then calculated with the maximum likelihood estimation. Stata 17.0 was used for all calculations.

This study contributes to the ongoing discussion in HRM about the influence of training on turnover intention (e.g., Ju & Li, 2019; Jun & Eckardt, 2023). In particular, the results confirm that we need to consider moderators in understanding how training affects the intention to quit (Jun & Eckardt, 2023). In addition, it seems that variables that are specific to a particular group or organisation (e.g., employee membership in the case of CFIs) should be taken into account as moderators. This conclusion is in line with the calls from many authors to put a greater emphasis on context in HRM research (F. L. Cooke, 2018; Mayrhofer et al., 2019).

This paper also adds to the literature on co-operatives by indicating how training might affect employee attitudes at CFIs. As HRM in co-operatives is an understudied topic (Voigt & von der Oelsnitz, 2023), the conclusions presented in this article might be a good starting point for future research.

This paper additionally explores the role of employee membership, which to date has not received the attention it deserves in CFI studies (Jones et al., 2016). Because membership is at the heart of co-operatives (International Co-operative Alliance, 2015), this analysis also contributes to the body of research on co-operative identity (e.g., Novkovic et al., 2022).

One limitation of the present research is its focus on formal training and lack of disaggregation into several types of training (e.g., on-the-job training and off-the-job training) (Ju & Li, 2019). Different types of training may affect employee attitudes differently; hence, further research should address this issue in the context of the specificity of CFIs. For example, it would be interesting to examine whether training related to the communication of co-operative values and principles has a stronger impact on employee attachment than other types of training. Taking other forms of development into account should also give a more complete picture of the relationships being analysed, given that training in CFIs is often complemented by informal development (Lawrynowicz & Piasecki, 2015).

Furthermore, the same respondents answered questions on both independent variables and turnover intention, which is a potential source of common method bias (CMB) risk. To minimise this risk, the measurements of the independent and dependent variables were separated from each other in the questionnaire, respondents were assured that their responses would remain anonymous; the ambiguity of the statements was also reduced through consultations with representatives of two sectoral institutions (Kock et al., 2021; Podsakoff et al., 2003). It is also possible that some employees may not be able to remember correctly the intensity of the training in which they participated (Krueger & Rouse, 1998). These issues may be overcome by linking administrative training data with employee attitudes in future analyses.

Moreover, the way CFIs treat their members may vary considerably, and this should be considered in future studies. For example, Szambelańczyk et al. (2020) identified five models of relationship between the co-operative bank and its stakeholders. In one of them (“the club model”), membership was offered only to highly valued employees on the basis of previous merits. Finally, the relationships explored in this study should be tested using more recent data. Unfortunately, to the best of the author’s knowledge, since 2017, no research has been conducted on Polish co-operative bank employees on the same scale as that used in this study. For example, Annusewicz and Radkiewicz, (2019) examined 200 Polish co-operative bank employees in 2019, but only in managerial positions. Kazmierczyk and Zajdler’s (2020) study included more than 600 cooperative bank employees, but was conducted between 2016 and 2019 (i.e., it started earlier than the research presented in this article). Szambelańczyk et al.’s (2020) study was a pilot focused on the topic of bank-member relations and had only 55 responses, 60% of which were from employees. Finally, Kowalewski (2021) carried out a survey in 2020, but it included only 50 co-operative bank employees.

This study confirms the positive role of training in employee attitudes in CFIs. The effect of decreasing turnover intention through greater training intensity is especially visible in these companies, in which the average willingness to quit is relatively high. This should inspire CFIs managers to take a closer look at proper HRM practices. However, they should take into account the possibility that specific HR differentiation practices may take place in a given organisation (Piasecki, 2019). As employeemembers on average receive more training (Piasecki, 2021) and are more receptive to training in terms of changing their attitudes, it is possible that in some organisations they have achieved a stronger influence in this area (and perhaps other areas of HRM) over time.

The present analysis also revealed a substantial problem with younger employees of CFIs. The results indicate that they do not react as positively to training as their older colleagues. In addition, their membership status does not change their attitude towards training in a significant way. Because age is negatively correlated with turnover intention (Mor Barak et al., 2001) and affects the preferences of the co-operative members (Höhler & Kühl, 2018), the natural way to deal with this challenge is to understand what drives positive attitudes among younger employees of CFIs (both members and non-members) and how HRM practices can thus help retain them.

This work was supported financially by the Polish Bank Association (Związek Banków Polskich) and the National Association of Cooperative Banks (Krajowy Związek Banków Spółdzielczych). Representatives of both institutions helped in formulating questions in the research tool and in encouraging co-operative banks to participate in the research project. However, none of these institutions influenced the process of the analysis and interpretation of data, the writing of the article, or the decision to submit the article for publication.