Determinants of Personal Support Workers’ Intention to Stay in Community Care Organizations

This study tests the impact of work intensification on work stress, job satisfaction, and intention to stay focusing on personal support workers. Work stress and job satisfaction are the mediating variables and intention to stay is the endogenous variable. Data come from our 2015 survey of 999 personal support workers, the largest occupational group in home and community care, employed in Ontario, Canada. Using structural equation modeling, we find that work intensification is significantly and positively related to work stress, and work stress has a significant negative association with extrinsic job satisfaction and intrinsic job satisfaction. Moreover, while intrinsic job satisfaction is positively associated with intention to stay, there is no significant relationship between extrinsic job satisfaction and intention to stay. Our findings explain the mechanism between work intensification and intention to stay and demonstrate that the impact of extrinsic job satisfaction and intrinsic job satisfaction ...