Building upon the `social exchange theory' notion (Blau, 1964), this paper investigates the moderating impact of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) strategy on the relationship between power and turnover intention. While power and LMX were conceptualized as seven and four dimensional constructs respectively, turnover intention was treated as a unidimensional construct. 91 pairs of Malaysian managers and their subordinates voluntarily took part in this research. The findings suggest that the hypotheses for direct effects received high support, indicating that power is a direct predictor of employees' turnover intention. The paper also discusses the implications of the findings and potential limitations.

Many manufacturing companies in Malaysia have either downsized, rightsized, or made other adjustments in response to the economic pressures of the last decade, hence, the ability to retain their subordinates in the organizations has become a requisite competency and may be more critical to job-related success for many managers. Under these circumstances, employees' turnover intentions have become common and workers' mobility decisions become a critical issue. Supervisors' relationship with subordinates represented an important source of power to exert influence in their organizations (Blau, 1964; and Mechanic, 1962). Employee turnover remains one of the most widely researched subjects in organizational analyses (Dalton and Todor, 1981; Koeske and Koeske, 1993; and Siong et al., 2006). Even though, there was significant research progress conducted in this topic, there still remains a great deal of confusion as to what might actually have caused the employees to leave their organizations.

Social power relationship occurs naturally when people with different levels of potential power interact to accomplish organizational goals (Mossholder et al., 1998). Social relations entail ties of mutual dependence between two parties. Therefore, it is more or less necessary that each party be able to control or influence the conduct of others. Blau (1964) rationalized that social exchange theory can be used to explain leadership influence in human interactions and this is further supported by Hollander and Offermann (1990), where they endorsed the importance of social exchange or transaction over time that exists between the supervisors and subordinates, including reciprocal influence and interpersonal perception. In other words, the ability of individuals to behave in ways consistent with their identities and to invoke an identity in others is possibly affected by social context (Stryker, 1994). It is believed that the supervisors could earn the credits from followers' perceptions of their leaders' competence and loyalty and in return the supervisors could use these credits to influence followers' compliance and commitment to achieve the organizational goals.

Supervisors Power and Turnover Intention: The Moderating Impact of Leader-Member Exchange Strategy, influence, subordinates, organizational, supervisors, credits, managers, potential, exchange, ability, actually, decade, dependence, affected, dimensional, economic, employees, endorsed, Exchange, behave, hypotheses, implications, interpersonal, investigates, loyalty, Mechanic, mobility