ABSTRACT

Health professionals, doctors and nurses who are experiencing the effects of the pandemic intensively on the front lines, as well as our health workers, hospital support service personnel are experiencing this effect quite a lot. This situation may even cause support service employees to be afraid of contracting COVID-19 and to leave their jobs due to this fear. 145 white and blue collar personnel working within the scope of waste services during the pandemic were the sample of the study and the relationship between the fear of contracting COVID-19 and the intention to quit the job was examined. The aim of this research is to see the effect of fears of exposure to COVID-19 disease of waste services personnel working in the hospital on their intention to quit their jobs. The employee questionnaires for the study, which is descriptive but of a cross-sectional type, were completed between 01.07.2021-01.08.2021. The employee questionnaires were completed between 01.07.2021-01.08.2021 Dec. SPSS analysis program was used in the analysis of the data. Within the scope of the research, a questionnaire prepared from scales whose validity and reliability were previously performed was used, and data from the participants were collected face-to-face. As a result of the survey, 96.5% of the participants were male, 60% were married, 85.5% had a high school or lower education status. It has been shown that 46.2% of them live with their spouse and children. In the study, the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients of the scales were determined as 0.90 for COVID-19 fear and 0.91 for intention to quit work. The SPSS program was used for the analysis of the data and Cronbach’s Alpha method was applied for the reliability of the scales. Mann Whitney-U and t-test, one of the difference tests, were used for sociodemographic variables. While the COVID-19 fear and intention to quit work scale averages did not differ according to sociodemographic characteristics, it was found that COVID-19 fear had a significant high-level relationship with intention to quit work. As a result of the research, it has been seen that the fear of COVID-19 affects the intentions of employees to quit their jobs. In addition to the intention to quit work, the psychological dimension of COVID-19 fear can also be examined, and its impact on work performance should also be evaluated separately.