The Correlation Of Affective Attachment, Job Embeddedness, And Turnover Intention

As the global economy becomes increasingly knowledge based, organizations that can success-fully retain their human resources have an advantage over organizations that cannot. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that turnover negatively effects performance.Hatch and Dyer summarized such findings with the observation that "firms with high turnover significantly under-perform their rivals"As such, organizational leaders are interested in understanding why people choose to leave their jobs and insights that might help with employee retention. Accordingly, researchers have spent considerable effort developing and testing models to explain why people quit.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 top-level 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. Other factors besides job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job alternatives are important for understanding turnover. 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 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 purpose of this research was to develop a multidimensional measure of job market perceptions based on a meta-analysis. Item sets were developed to operationally define the dimensions and were tested among3samples. Results of a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in3samples indicated that the5scales have satisfactory psychometric properties, construct, and criterion-related validity. The5dimensions accounted for significant and relatively large amounts of turnover variance, even after a number of standard turnover predictors had been taken into account. The results suggest the presence of job search microprocesses in the employee turnover process. These microprocesses are described and integrated into current thinking about the turnover process.This research developed and tested a model of turnover intention in which the job embeddedness and affective attachment influence employees’ decisions to quit. In a sample of1000employees a national firm, multilevel analysis revealed that affective attachment and job embeddedness explain variance in individual "voluntary turnover" over and above that explained by other individual and group-level predictors. Broadly speaking, these results suggest that job embeddedness and affective attachment play critical roles in explaining why people quit their jobs. Implications are discussed.