Turnover intention
Workforce and Leadership
Definition. Turnover intention is an employee’s conscious plan or willingness to leave their organisation or profession within a certain period.
Explanation
It is the strongest predictor of actual turnover and is widely used in health workforce research. Distributed leadership has been linked to lower turnover intention and higher engagement among nursing staff (Quek et al., 2021), while burnout raises it among emergency workers (Hamdan et al., 2026).
High turnover increases costs and threatens continuity and safety of care.
Related concepts
Burnout Job satisfaction Health workforce Distributed leadership Organizational commitment
Read on The Health Topics
- Who Should Run the Hospital? Eight Positions and What Sixty Years of Evidence Leaves Standing
- Burnout among emergency department healthcare workers in Palestine and Türkiye: a cross-sectional comparative study
References
Hamdan, M., Erdem, R., Toraman, A., Ceylan, H., Rashed, A., & Jawabreh, B. (2026). Burnout among emergency department healthcare workers in Palestine and Türkiye: a cross-sectional comparative study. BMC Emergency Medicine.
Quek, S. J., Thomson, L., Houghton, R., Bramley, L., Davis, S., & Cooper, J. (2021). Distributed leadership as a predictor of employee engagement, job satisfaction and turnover intention in UK nursing staff. Journal of Nursing Management, 29(6), 1544–1553. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.13321
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Turnover intention. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/turnover-intention/
Articles that discuss this concept
2 articles on The Health Topics mention this concept. Most relevant first.