Developmental climate: A cross-level analysis of voluntary turnover and job performance

• Shared perceptions of developmental support form a developmental climate.
• Climate influenced organizational commitment, engagement, and perceived competence.
• Organizational commitment mediated developmental climate to individual turnover.
• Perceived competence mediated developmental climate to individual performance.
• We utilized multi-level structural equation modeling to test these relationships.

This research investigates the influence of shared perceptions of developmental climate on individual-level perceptions of organizational commitment, engagement, and perceived competence, and whether these attitudes mediate the relationship between developmental climate and both individual voluntary turnover and supervisor-rated job performance. Survey data were collected from 361 intact employee–supervisory mentoring dyads and matched with employee turnover data collected one year later to test the proposed framework using multilevel modeling techniques. As expected, shared perceptions of developmental climate were significantly and positively related to all three individual work attitudes. In addition, both organizational commitment and perceived competence were significant mediators of the positive relationship between shared perceptions of developmental climate and voluntary turnover, as well as shared perceptions of developmental climate and supervisor-rated job performance. By contrast, no significant mediating effects were found for engagement. Theoretical implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.