How to retain 'disloyal' Millennials

Soon, the global work force will consist for a great extent out of Millennials (people born between 1982 and 1994). Therefore, organizations have no choice but to learn how to recruit, grow and retain these Millennials, to make use of their full potential and be successful. Although job-hopping behaviour seems to be the new norm among Millennials, this research builds upon the comforting idea that organizations still have influence in shaping this behaviour. It therefore answers the research question how to better retain Millennials by investigating two important organizational predictors for turnover: job satisfaction and organizational commitment. It does so by first, elaborating on the role loyalty plays in the context of Millennial job-hopping behaviour, second, by introducing a new construct for measuring job satisfaction, and third, by proposing empowering leadership and strategic autonomy as practices organizations can adopt to better retain this generation. Findings show that first, organizational commitment and job satisfaction do reduce the chance of Millennials leaving the organization, but are not sufficient to enhance loyalty behaviour of Millennials, second, empowering leadership and strategic autonomy are both positively related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment when it comes to non Millennials, but when it comes to Millennials, only empowering leadership appeared to be effective in enhancing organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Implying that when organizations are having trouble retaining their Millennial employees, they should consider adopting a more empowering leadership style.