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A new construct, entitled "job embeddedness," is introduced. It includes individuals' (1) links to other people, teams, and groups, (2) perceptions of their fit with job, organization, and community, and (3) what they say they would have to sacrifice if they left their jobs. We developed a measure of job embeddedness with two samples. The results show that job embeddedness predicts the key outcomes of both intent to leave and "voluntary turnover" and explains significant incremental variance over and above job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job alternatives, and job search.
The personal and organizational costs of leaving a job are often very high. It is not surprising, then, that employee retention has the attention of toplevel managers in today's organizations. The questions that challenge social scientists and practitioners alike are "Why do people leave?" and "Why do they stay?" Over the years, researchers have developed partial answers to these questions. More specifically, given alternatives, people stay if they are satisfied with their jobs and committed to their organizations and leave if they aren't. However, the research in scientific journals reports that work attitudes play only a relatively small role overall in employee retention and leaving (Hom & Griffeth, 1995; Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000). Other factors besides job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job alternatives are important for understanding turnover (Maertz & Campion, 1998).
The purpose of this article is to present a new construct called job embeddedness. We believe that it is a key factor in understanding why people stay on their jobs. First, we review the existing literature on organizational attachment; second, we define job embeddedness; and third, we describe how it is similar to and different from major constructs in the attachment literature. Next, we report empirical development of a measure of job embeddedness, describe its reliability and validity, and test its ability to predict voluntary turnover against that of other constructs. Finally, we discuss how employers can increase or decrease embeddedness and thereby influence subsequent employee propensities to stay in or leave a job.
THE ATTACHMENT LITERATURE
Most of the current theory and research on voluntary turnover springs from the ideas of March and Simon (1958) on the perceived ease and desirability of leaving one's job. The perceived ease of movement is...