The impact of empowerment, working condition, and work-family conflict on emotional exhaustion and turnover intention among garment workers in Indonesia

Garment industry in Indonesia continues to be the key component of Indonesia's manufacturing industry and is an important source of employment. However, there is a marginal decline of employment in Garment, Textiles and Footwear (GTF) industry from around 4.3 million in 2012. One of the causes is high rate of turnover in garment industry. Low wages, poor working conditions, lack of support from supervisor and or company's management, and even imbalance between work and personal life, make factory workers easy to experience stress and burnout. These are probably the triggers of workers' intention to leave the factory. The purpose of this research is to assess the impact of empowerment, working condition, and work family conflict, on emotional exhaustion and turnover intention among garment workers. This paper provides an insight on the importance of proper and supportive working environment to prevent high rate of turnover, and also to promote better employment in garment industry. Convenience sampling was used for this research and the samples consists of 3694 factory workers from several areas in Java island. This research use Structural Equation Modeling to test the relationship between five research variables (empowerment, working condition, work family conflict, emotional exhaustion, and turnover intention). Results show that working condition and work family conflict trigger workers' high emotional exhaustion. On the other hand, empowerment reduce emotional exhaustion. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.