Development of a global measure of job embeddedness and integration into a traditional model of voluntary turnover.

TLDR

Job embeddedness research shows that on‑ and off‑the‑job forces bind employees to their jobs. The study aimed to integrate job embeddedness into a traditional voluntary‑turnover model. The authors developed and tested a global reflective measure of job embeddedness to complement the original composite measure and incorporated it into the turnover model. Longitudinal results indicate that job embeddedness predicts voluntary turnover beyond traditional variables and interacts with job satisfaction, extending the original model.

Abstract

Recent research on job embeddedness has found that both on- and off-the-job forces can act to bind people to their jobs. The present study extended this line of research by examining how job embeddedness may be integrated into a traditional model of voluntary turnover. This study also developed and tested a global, reflective measure of job embeddedness that overcomes important limitations and serves as a companion to the original composite measure. Results of this longitudinal study found that job embeddedness predicted voluntary turnover beyond job attitudes and core variables from traditional models of turnover. Results also found that job embeddedness interacted with job satisfaction to predict voluntary turnover, suggesting that the job embeddedness construct extends beyond the unfolding model of turnover (T. R. Mitchell & T. W. Lee, 2001) it originated from.