The psychological mechanism linking life satisfaction and turnover intention among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 challenged and brought turmoil to the healthcare workers' mental and psychological well-being. Specifically, they are feeling tremendous pressure and many of them worry about their work conditions and even intent to leave them. In this situation, it is of utmost for them to satisfied their lives during the challenging situation. OBJECTIVE: This paper explores the relationship of life satisfaction with healthcare workers' turnover intention during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was hypothesized that this relationship would be mediated by trust climate, and this mediation association would be stronger when workers experience job embeddedness in the workplace. METHODS: Survey data were collected from the 520 healthcare workers. A moderated mediation examination was employed to test the hypotheses. RESULTS: Results revealed that life satisfaction is positively related to a trusting climate that, in turn, is negatively related to workers' turnover intention. Moreover, the association between life satisfaction and turnover intention was moderated by job embeddedness. CONCLUSIONS: Focusing on improving healthcare workers' job embeddedness and increasing their trust climate might enhance life satisfaction and reduce turnover intention. The implications of the findings are also discussed for research and practice.