The Story of Why We Stay: A Review of Job Embeddedness

Abstract

In this article, we examine the history and development of job embeddedness, beginning with the story of the idea's conception, theoretical foundation, and original empirical structure as a major predictor of employee voluntary turnover. We then consider more recent expansions in the theoretical structure and empirical measurement of job embeddedness, exploring job embeddedness as a causal indicator model versus a reflective model. Next, we review some promising expansions of embeddedness to new domains (e.g., family embeddedness) as well as important contingency factors that enhance or diminish its impact. Finally, we describe how job embeddedness affects important organizational outcomes beyond turnover, including job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, innovation, and the development of social and human capital. Throughout the article, we provide our opinions on how the theory and research on embeddedness have progressed as well as ideas on how it can be improved.

Surveying the forest: A meta‐analysis, moderator investigation, and future‐oriented discussion of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover

“…This may partly be a function of limited relative studies available, such as embeddedness (i.e., a possible Type II error), but it also points to an interesting consideration: Possibly, who leaves (i.e., a "bad apple" versus a supportive colleague) is more important than the raw metric of how many employees leave. In job embeddedness theory, considering the quality of links-beyond mere quantity-could be insightful in this regard (Lee, Burch, & Mitchell, 2014). In general, though the results show that when the work environment is one in which withdrawal, thoughts of withdrawal, and actual quitting are higher, antecedents such as alternatives, search, and withdrawal cognitions have even more positive effects, whereas factors that typically prevent turnover (e.g., high performance, longer tenure and higher pay) have weaker (i.e., closer to zero) effects.…”

Job satisfaction, job stress and nurses’ turnover intentions: The moderating roles of on‐the‐job and off‐the‐job embeddedness

“…Future research could test the predictive value of models including these factors in addition to those that were already studied in our current model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017;Van der Heijden et al, 2018). Research may also pay attention to age-related differences in the workplace (Fasbender & Wang, 2017a,b) Lee et al, 2014).…”

Exploring the interpersonal determinants of job embeddedness and voluntary turnover: A conservation of resources perspective

“…Given the usefulness of job embeddedness in retaining employees, researchers have made considerable efforts to explore its antecedents, including organisational factors (e.g., benefit programmes and human resource management practices) and personal characteristics (e.g., extraversion and enhanced and newly acquired skills; Ghosh & Gurunathan, 2015). Although social relations in the workplace have been recognised as a driving force for job embeddedness (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001), they have received relatively little empirical attention (Lee, Burch, & Mitchell, 2014). Existing work has shown that low levels of co-worker job embeddedness lead to high levels of co-worker job search behaviour, which in turn lead to employee turnover (Felps et al, 2009), and supervisor job embeddedness relates positively to employees' own job embeddedness (Ng & Feldman, 2013).…”