Differences Between Gender and Generations on the Intention to Quit Work Amongst Police Officers

2022, Abstract Scrutiny of demographic diversity in organisations is imperative as significant differences have emerged from multiple aspects of the workforce, especially gender and generation. Subsequently, the observed differences often lead to discrepancies in determining the causal factors of the intention to quit work. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the dissimilarities in selected demographics regarding the intention to quit work amongst police officers. This study is important because the inconsistencies and contradictions of previous studies on generational and gender differences in intentions to quit work are research gaps that should be explored. A total of 513 respondents' data were collected from the questionnaire. These data were analysed using the Kruskal Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests to examine the differences between gender and generations, on the intention to quit work . The results of the study show that there is no difference between gender and generations in the intention to quit work among police officers. This study also has important implications that contribute to the existing body of knowledge, the management of an organization, practitioners, and policymakers, notably to know the dissatisfaction due to the lack of sensitivity to the needs of each gender and generation. Recommendations for future research are also presented.


Introduction
The contemporary ever-changing work environment has resulted in skilled workers possessing various opportunities to advance their careers (ILO, 2018). Organisations are accountable for employee engagement and empowerment by optimising the current management quality towards workforce retention. Accordingly, the management of an organisation has currently encountered multitudinous issues and challenges owing to the demographic diversity in the adult workforce, including different age groups, genders, behaviours, and traits (Dutta & Mishra, 2021;Yadav & Lenka, 2022). As such, focusing on demographic diversity in organisations is essential due to the significant differences observed in multiple facets of the workforce, especially gender and generation (Dutta & Mishra, 2021).
The observed differences could lead to disagreement and disunity in the workforce if organisations do not emphasise the vital role of understanding the behavioural differences amongst employees (Ng & Parry, 2016). Behavioural differences could trigger misunderstandings and dissatisfaction (Eberz, 2019), engendering disharmonious relationships in a company that would precipitate the sentiments of depression, anger, and frustration amongst employees to the point of having a strong intention to quit work from the organisation (Reina et al., 2018;Reknes et al., 2020;Reyhanoglu & Akin, 2020). Nevertheless, in-depth comprehension of the generational and gender differences amongst employees could assist to reduce conflicts while increasing interpersonal relationships within an organisation (Dutta & Mishra, 2021;Eberz, 2019), suggesting further investigation of the differences in traits and demographics that could induce negative employee behaviours (Andreescu & Vito, 2021;Memon et al., 2020).
Past research involving the aspects of gender and generation should be reviewed thoroughly to discover and determine the rationales and differences in the intention to quit work in narrowing the current research gap within the empirical studies (Brown et al., 2019;Denisi et al., 2017;Ikavalko & Kohvakka, 2021;Jawahar, 2007;Shen et al., 2020;Sutin et al., 2020;Yazid et al., 2017). A review of the past research illustrated that studies examining generational differences in work values were inconsistent and contradictory to one another (Lyons & Kuron, 2014;Singh et al., 2020). Similarly, the findings from the studies on gender associated with the intention to quit work were also varied (Andreescu & Vito, 2021; Matz et al., 2014). Due to the discrepancies in the previous findings, subsequent studies tended to focus on consistent research areas, such as integrity, job satisfaction, work stress, emotional fitness, and asset misappropriation schemes, amongst members of the Royal Malaysia Police (RMP) organisation.
In general, a total of 2446 policemen were found to proceed with early retirement from a total of 5,000 police officers who retired between January and October 2018. According to former Inspector General of Police Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun, the trend of early retirement in the enforcement institutions has reached a worrying degree in the RMP team (Bernama, 2018). Hence, due to a dearth of previous studies on the RMP organisation, the current study was conducted to examine the differences between gender and generation regarding the intention to quit work amongst police officers.
In conclusion, the current study possesses important implications to contribute to the existing body of knowledge, management of an organisation, practitioners, and policymakers. Besides, this study could also present a clearer picture of the differences in the perception between gender and generation on the intention to quit work. The perception of respondents consisting of different genders and generations towards the intention to quit work could provide holistic knowledge for future research when replicating and expanding the scopes of the current study. Subsequently, appropriate assignment intervention programmes could be planned, prepared, and refined when managing diverse workforce behaviours effectively to create unity in the workplace.

Research Objectives
Two research objectives were formulated below OBJ. 1 : To determine the significant difference between genders in the intention to quit work amongst police officers. OBJ. 2 : To determine the significant difference between generations in the intention to quit work amongst police officers. (Comeau & Tung, 2013;Tung & Comeau, 2014). On the other hand, Generation X is also known as the New Economic Policy Generation (NEP) born between 1970to 1990(Mak Din, 2014. Moreover, colleagues (2012, 2018) identified Generation X as 'Social-Strivers', a group of individuals born between 1962 to 1977.

Generation Z
Generation Z is a group of individuals born between 2000 and the present day (Burton et al., 2019;Wiedmer, 2015). On the other hand, Robinson (2018); Scholz (2019) stated that Generation Z was born from 1995 to 2012, contrasting to the definition by Pew Research (2019) in which Generation Z was born from 1997 onwards. Meanwhile, Generation Z in the Malaysian context is known as 'Generation #4' who are born from 2005 onwards (Comeau & Tung, 2013). Moreover, co-workers (2012, 2018) named this generation 'Neoteric-Inheritors' who were born from 1992 onwards, and Din (2014) labelled this generation as the 'Vision Generation', born between 1991 and 2020.

Gender
Theoretically, conventional gender roles have outlined that males and females adopt different social and cultural norms to adhere to the accepted gender behaviours respectively when socialising (Eagly et al., 1995). Correspondingly, males and females exhibit distinguishing demeanours and behave differently when gender stereotypes are pronounced (Vogel et al., 2003) as gender roles are frequently determined by a certain culture practised in a society or country (Vogel et al., 2003). The differences between males and females are also visible in multiple career paths. Melamed (1995Melamed ( , 1996 discovered that females displayed a slower path of career development with longer working time and higher levels of career disruption, compared to their male counterparts. The hurdles were related to biological and social factors as females were frequently perceived to bear greater responsibilities, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and obligations, in raising children (Bender et al., 2005;Lyness & Thompson, 1997). As such, the gender role theory was proposed by Eagly and Karau (1991) to explain the differences posed by the undergoing social changes of an individual. Each role would often be driven by the process of socialisation to influence the attitudes that males and females would internalise towards their encountered social alterations (Cloninger et al., 2015).
Owing to the existing gender stereotypes, females are less likely to pursue self-initiated expatriation as a career strategy than men. Past studies also revealed that men and women possessed different intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in the workplace (Clark, 1997;Huang & Gamble, 2015), which were typically shaped by their respective cultures and social context (Bosch et al., 2018). According to Eagly (1987) and Muskat and Reitsamer (2019), the social gender theory posited that job satisfaction amongst females and males was divergent, depending on job characteristics, family responsibilities, and personal intentions. Female workers were frequently reported to have a higher intention to quit work compared to male workers (Nouri & Parker, 2020).

Intention to Quit Work
The intention to quit work is generally defined as an employee's desire or psychological thought to voluntarily leave an organisation (Watrous et al., 2006). Porter and Steers (1973) proposed that the intention to quit work was elicited from the logical thinking of the arisen feeling of dissatisfaction and was often the last step before deciding to resign. Moreover, the intention to quit work could also be described as employees' tendency to commence pondering about seeking a new work organisation (Griffeth et al., 2000;Mobley et al., 1979;Saira et al., 2020). Accordingly, an organisation could measure the actual turnover rate by determining the rate of intention to quit work amongst its employees (Ajzen, 1991(Ajzen, , 2020Arnold et al., 1982;King & Tang, 2018;Lim & Parker, 2020;Mobley, 1977;Shore et al., 1990).

Generation, Gender, and Intention to Quit Work
Based on past studies, the generation of baby boomers was considered to retain higher levels of loyalty towards an organisation compared with their counterparts of Generation X and Generation Y (Mui et al., 2019;Twenge et al., 2010). Baby boomers experienced a more difficult time of life compared to other generations and hence, they would be more appreciative of the available jobs that changed the course and uplifted the standards of their lives. Meanwhile, Generation Y witnessed a more advanced life amidst the rapid development of technology (Gursoy et al., 2008;Ng & Parry, 2016) and gradually succeeded in the position of workers from the generation of baby boomers who were in the process of retirement (Idris et al., 2015;Pasko et al., 2021). Hence, Generation Y was found to be the generation having a higher level of voluntary resignation than the preceding generations (Arora & Dhole, 2019; Kowske et al., 2010;Sakdiyakorn & Wattanacharoensil, 2018).
In comparison, Generation Z has the highest degree of inclination to leave an organisation without advance notice and believes that the current life is meant for personal enjoyment (Scholz, 2019). In addition, Generation Z teems with digital products resulting from the development of technology in global communication, such as internet access and social media, thus creating a generation with the highest level of digital literacy in the field of social networking. However, only a small number from Generation Z are beginning to enter the world of work (Burton et al., 2019). As such, the research on the attitudes and behaviours of Generation Z is indispensable as available findings could provide important implications in predicting the emerging trends from this generation (AbouAssi et al., 2019; Burton et al., 2019) while comparing the differences in intention to quit work across different generations (Kee et al., 2019).
Several past studies showed that there was a significant effect of gender on the intention to quit work, wherein Torre (2014) found that females had a higher tendency to leave maledominated jobs, including policing, while Santhanam and Srinivas (2019) discovered that males possessed higher levels of perception of their intentions to quit work. On the other hand, opposite findings were also discovered that there was no significant relationship between gender and intention of quitting work in the police force (Drew et al., 2008;Haque et al., 2019;Haque, 2020). Despite the contradictory findings, certain factors, such as worklife imbalance, would engender females to quit work to a higher extent than their male counterparts (Liu & Ngo, 2017;Nouri & Parker, 2020). Correspondingly, lower levels of psychological well-being perceived in female workers would also lead to relatively higher levels of intention to quit work than in male employees (Andreescu & Vito, 2021;Jabutay & Rungruang, 2020;Jafar & Mahfuz, 2013;Mishra & Bhatnagar, 2019;Oyet et al., 2019;Pant & Venkateswaran, 2020;Pradhan et al., 2019). Therefore, organisational support is a prerequisite to improving well-being in the workplace and reducing the intention to quit work amongst female workers. Based on the results of previous studies, several hypotheses were formulated as follows:

H1a
: There is a significant difference between gender (males and females) and intention to quit work amongst police officers.

H2a
: There is a significant difference between generation and intention to quit work amongst police officers.

Methodology Measurement
The instrument employed was a questionnaire consisting of seven questions related to the intention to quit work (Kuvaas, 2006;Vigoda, 2000), such as "I often think of quitting work". The current study also utilised a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) for each construct. The questionnaire was translated into Malay while retaining the original meaning in English to ensure easy comprehension by all levels of police officers in their mother tongue language. Before the stage of data collection, the questionnaire was subjected to several pre-tests, pilot studies, and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to redefine the intention to quit work construct factors. The analysis of the value of Cronbach's alpha coefficient was also reflected to be at 0.905, which was larger than 0.70 as required to be considered a reliable instrument (Nunnally, 1978).

Field Study and Data Collection
The current study was a cross-sectional survey wherein the researcher selected four police districts (IPD) as the study areas in Sarawak, namely Kuching, Sibu, Bintulu, and Miri. The selection of the four districts was based on the existing and available network, time, and cost while accounting for the constraints owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the researcher also obtained permission from the PDRM organisation before conducting the study. The total population of the four police districts was 2,382 police officers. A minimum sample size of 328 was determined based on the sample calculation method of Cohen and colleagues (2001).
The sampling technique employed was proportional strata random sampling (Bougie & Sekaran, 2020;Saleh, 2021). After determining the minimum percentage of samples for each district, a list of respondent names from each district was randomly selected by using the electronic spreadsheet software -Microsoft Excel, in which a list of names from number 1261 onwards was chosen as the sample of the current study. Data were collected from the respondents via a self-administered online application -google.doc.form (Bougie & Sekaran, 2020;Bryman & Bell, 2011;ILO, 2020;McCartney et al., 2022;Mondal et al., 2019;Proctor, 2005;Torrentira, 2020;Vasantha & Harinarayana, 2016;Wargadinata et al., 2020).
The response rate from the selected respondents was between 35% to 50% (Mellahi & Harris, 2016) whereby 577 respondents (45.76%) answered the questionnaire. All data outliers had also been identified and removed from the collected data list (Field, 2018), resulting in a total of 513 sample data finalised and utilised as the measurement sample. Table  1 portrays the descriptive statistics composed of different demographics regarding the intention to quit work. Interpretation level analysis was performed from the value of five points on the Likert scale and the range from 1 to 5 was divided into three levels, namely 0.00 -2.33 (low), 2.34 -3.67 (medium), and 3.68 -5.00 (high) (Darussalam & Hussin, 2016).
Generally, the mean for the intention to quit work reflected a low 2.24. Regarding the control variables (demographics), the mean levels of different demographic components varied between 1.85 and 2.54 from a low to moderate level with IPD Miri having the lowest level compared to the other three IPDs. Accordingly, males demonstrated a lower perception of intention to quit work compared to females. Besides, Generation Z was discovered to have the lowest level of intention to quit work compared to the preceding generations. Meanwhile, academic qualifications at the PMR/SRP level displayed the lowest intention to quit work compared to other types of qualifications.

Findings
Tests of normality on Kurtosis and skewness discovered that Z values were between -1.014 and 3.89 and not between -3.00 and 3.00, thus indicating that the intention to quit work data was not normal. As such, the Kruskal Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were implemented to examine the differences in control variables, including gender and generations, on the intention to quit work. Furthermore, collinearity was identified by performing a full collinearity test that demonstrated a single value on the constructed value (Kock, 2015;Kock & Lynn, 2012). Based on the collinearity test, the variance inflation factors value (VIF) for intention to quit work was below the value of 3.3 or 5. Therefore, no bias was detected in the variable of intention to quit work (Hair et al., 2018;Kock, 2015;Kock & Lynn, 2012). Both tests were analysed by executing the IBM-SPSS Version 25 software to test the proposed hypotheses: H1a: There is a significant difference between gender (males and females) and intention to quit work amongst police officers.  ;Cohen, 1988) Table 1 depicts the results from the analysis of the Mann-Whitney U test, hence demonstrating that the effect of gender from both males (n = 352) and females (n = 161) was insignificant in explaining the intention to quit work amongst police officers with a p-value = 0.169, which exceeded the significance level of 0.05. Since p > 0.05, H1a was rejected. The findings postulated that the perception of intention to quit work amongst police officers was not influenced by the effect of gender.
H2a: There is a significant difference between generation and intention to quit work amongst police officers.  (Cohen, 1988) Table 2 portrays that the effects from the generation of baby boomers (n = 12), Generation X (n = 174), Generation Y (n = 269), and Generation Z (n = 58) were insignificant in delineating the intention to quit work, wherein the value of p = 0.213 was higher than the significant level of 0.05. Since p > 0.05, H2a was rejected. The test suggested that there was no dissimilarity in the perception of the intention to quit work amongst police officers across generations.

Discussion OBJ 1: To Determine the Significant Difference between Genders in the Intention to Quit Work amongst Police Officers.
Based on the findings obtained and delineated in Table 1, no significant difference was discovered between males and females in the intention to quit work. The results propounded that the perceptions of male and female police officers from the four IPDs in Sarawak did not pose any particular impact on the intention to quit work. As such, the findings contrasted that of Torre (2014) where male-dominated jobs, such as policing, would impel females to have higher levels of intention in quitting their current jobs. Conversely, Santhanam and Srinivas (2019) found that males had a higher likelihood to quit their work compared to females. However, Matz and co-workers (2014) demonstrated that the intention to quit working received negligible influence from the effect of gender. The finding was also concurrent with other previous studies investigating the effect of gender in the police force (Drew et al., 2008;Haque, 2020;Haque et al., 2019;Jabutay & Rungruang, 2020;Pant & Venkateswaran, 2020;Pradhan et al., 2019;Shim et al., 2015;Andreescu & Vito, 2021).
Consequently, most past studies showed no significant difference between males and females in the intention to quit work while several researchers separately discovered that there was a higher degree of intention to qiut work amongst either males or females. Past research findings on the intention to quit work by comparing the differences between gender were inconsistent owing to multiple variables, including situations, cultures, environments, and economic factors. Moreover, differences would also happen when social changes experienced by an individual influence the existing attitudes of males and females (Cloninger et al., 2015;Eagly & Karau, 1991).

OBJ 2: To Determine the Significant Difference between Generations in the Intention to Quit Work amongst Police Officers.
Based on the results displayed in Table 2, the significant difference between four generations (baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z) in the intention to quit work amongst police officers was not demonstrated. The findings posited that the intention of individuals to quit work would not be influenced by the background of a distinct generation they belonged to amongst police officers in the IPDs of Sarawak. Hence, the findings are not consistent with those of Lu and Gursoy (2016); Haque (2020), manifesting that the intention to quit work was significantly contrasting amongst generations. However, environmental factors, such as globalisation, digital and technological advancement, and economic recession, engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, might have prominent influences on the differences existing in the level of intention to quit work.
Although the current study findings showed that the intention of quitting work did not differ between generations, past research discovered divergent findings as multiple confounding variables should be taken into consideration when interpreting the results. On the one hand, Pradhan and co-workers (2019) indicated that age did not significantly affect the intention to quit work, which was concurrent to the findings of this study. Furthermore, Andreescu and Vito (2021) also demonstrated that police officers' age would not influence their intention to quit work, propounding that the crime index in Sarawak was still under control compared to the index in different states of peninsular Malaysia. In addition, police officers working in small police departments would not manifest a significant difference in the intention to quitting work compared to larger police departments. Resultantly, the RMP organisation in Sarawak supported its members regardless of age group to encourage police personnel in the IPDs in becoming highly motivated to remain and work in the organisation.
The educational level of employees would also play a vital role in the intention to quit work (Vinayak et al., 2021). For example, employees with higher educational qualifications for a job position would more frequently intend to quit work due to their continuous search for better job opportunities to match their academic qualifications (Vinayak et al., 2021). Given the educational levels of the respondents in the current study, wherein the majority were at the SPM level (64.9%), the educational qualification would be suggested appropriately for the policing job as the intention to quit work amongst police officers was found at a lower degree.
During the stage of data collection, the ongoing process of the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the economic situation in Malaysia (Sutin et al., 2020). Accordingly, economic conditions would pose significant impacts on employees' intentions to quit work (Han, 2020;Onyemah et al., 2021;Sutin et al., 2020). The economic downturn and high unemployment rates as perceived during the COVID-19 pandemic had elevated the potential of job layoffs while increasing work stress levels (Onyemah et al., 2021). As such, when the first Movement Control Order was implemented on 18 March 2020 in Malaysia, the unemployment rate was witnessed to skyrocket due to efforts to curb the spreading of the COVID -19, resulting in the intention to quit amongst police personnel to be at a low degree due to high levels of uncertainties in the job market (Rashid & Dorashid, 2020).
In short, the ecological systems theory and generational theory are pertinent in delineating that human development is frequently influenced by the environment and interactions with past events when shaping unique personal behaviours that are distinctive between generations (Bronfenbrenner, 1970;Kupperschmidt, 2000;Lyons & Kuron, 2014;Ryder, 1965). The effect is particularly significant in the perception of the intention to quit work amongst police officers in the current study, in which no difference was found between generations as influenced by various factors resulting from the social, economic, and environmental interactions.

Conclusion
In the current study, the Kruskal Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to appraise the differences in the control variables between gender and generation regarding the intention to quit work amongst police officers. Hypothesis H1a and H2a had been examined in answering the two research objectives. Accordingly, the results of this study showed that significant differences were not discovered between gender and generation in the intention to quit work amongst police officers. The findings suggested that the levels of perception of the intention to quit work between gender and generation were not dissimilar significantly.

Implications of the Study
In regards to the study objectives, hypotheses, and subsequent findings, a policy or approach would be imperative for the RMP organisation to formulate by not differentiating any task or assignment between gender and generation. The rationale of this approach could be perceived from the results wherein gender and generation factors did not play an important role in determining the intention of a police officer to quit work. As such, the findings of the current study could be deemed important in contributing new evidence to the existing body of knowledge and providing initial guidance to an organisation when planning costs and expenditures on recruits efficiently to obtain an optimal number of police officers with demographic diversity while keeping the intention to quit work at the lowest degree as possible in the future.
The first practical implication contributed by the findings of the current study is a deeper understanding of the challenges of demographic diversity encountered by the RMP organisation in reducing the intention to quit work. However, according to Schuck and Rabe-Hemp (2018), the cost of recruiting a new law enforcer is exorbitant owing to various aspects, including the cost of recruitment, physical examination, and extensive training programme. The costs are to ensure that a well-equipped law enforcer could execute his or her expected job obligations to the highest standards. Correspondingly, police officers who retire early, that is, within 5 to 10 years of service, could result in a huge depletion of government resources applied to training a police officer (Allisey et al., 2014). The process of training would require a year for a police trainee to be fully independent as a qualified law enforcer (Allisey et al., 2014).
The current study would also contribute to an improved comprehension of the nature of demographic diversity, especially gender and generation, on the implications for the RMP organisation. One of the implications would be elevating the awareness of the importance of assessing police behaviour to increase productivity and organisational effectiveness while taking into account the effects of gender and generation. The enhanced awareness could assist supervisors, practitioners, and policymakers in effectively managing human resources and the relevant management practices when approaching the establishment of a highly efficient organisation. Accordingly, the formation of new policies or refinements of existing systems, such as implementing opportunities for promotion with higher levels of transparency and impartiality, designing motivating and achievable assignments, establishing mature rewarding practices, recognising different degrees of creativity, providing continuous organisational support, and tending to employee well-being, would help attract and motivate police officers to be passionate on their job while reducing the turnover rate (Adams & Mastracci, 2019).
Summarily, the RMP organisation needs to examine the value of work and the appropriate work practices to retain police officers from retiring earlier than usual. Top officials would also need to reappraise the current policies of human resource development by considering the differences between generational cohorts. Furthermore, organisational support, especially motivation, would also be imperative to attract police officers by formulating pertinent strategies to retain their loyalty and implementing programmes for