WHY PEOPLE STAY: USING JOB EMBEDDEDNESS TO PREDICT VOLUNTARY TURNOVER.
2001/12/01 by T. R. Mitchell, B. C. Holtom, Brooks C. Holtom +5 · 2,531 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Business #Demographic economics #Economics #Embeddedness #Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior #Job embeddedness #Job satisfaction #Labour economics #Management #Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering #Psychology #Public Policy and Administration Research #Social psychology #Sociology #Turnover #Turnover intention
paper · doi:10.2307/3069391
published in Academy of Management Journal 44(6), 1102-1121 (Academy of Management)
openalex publication_date 2001/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract
A new construct, entitled job embeddedness, is introduced. Assessing factors from on and off the job, it includes an individual’s (a) links to other people, teams and groups, (b) perception of their fit with their job, organization and community and (c) what they say they would have to sacrifice if they left their job. A measure of job embeddedness is developed 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. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. 3 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 job and committed to their organization and leave if they aren’t. However, the
Citations
Cited by
- Fun and friends: The impact of workplace fun and constituent attachment on turnover in a hospitality context
- One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research.
- Mobility, Skills, and the Michigan Non-Compete Experiment
- CONSEQUENCES OF INDIVIDUALS' FIT AT WORK: A META‐ANALYSIS OF PERSON–JOB, PERSON–ORGANIZATION, PERSON–GROUP, AND PERSON–SUPERVISOR FIT
- It's not you, it's them: Social influences on trust propensity and trust dynamics
- Why do international assignees stay? An organizational embeddedness perspective
- Managing Employee Withdrawal During Organizational Change
- Perceived Organizational Support and Turnover Intention: The Mediating Effects of Personal Sacrifice and Job Fit
- Job Embeddedness in a Culturally Diverse Environment
- Overqualified Employees’ Actual Turnover: The Role of Growth Dissatisfaction and the Contextual Effects of Age and Pay
- A review of job embeddedness: Conceptual, measurement issues, and directions for future research
- A multi-level model of withdrawal: Integrating and synthesizing theory and findings
- A typology of long-term expatriates: Conceptualization, consequences and future research
- Occupational embeddedness and job performance
- Careers: Mobility, Embeddedness, and Success
- It matters how old we feel in organizations: Testing a multilevel model of organizational subjective‐age diversity on employee outcomes
- Antecedents of organizational and community embeddedness: The roles of support, psychological safety, and need to belong
- Job embeddedness and voluntary turnover in the face of job insecurity
- Understanding organizational embeddedness and career success: Who and what you know
- Time, integration, and social membership in the firm: a Carensian social membership argument for democratic inclusion in the firm
- Are embedded employees active or passive? The roles of learning goal orientation and preferences for wide task boundaries and job mobility in the embeddedness–voice link
- Linking institutional context to the community and career embeddedness of skilled migrants: The role of destination- and origin-country identifications
- The effects of latent withdrawal profiles on employee turnover, destinations and job performance
- Strategic human resource management, human capital and competitive advantage: is the field going in circles?
- Workers’ tenure and firm productivity: New evidence from matched employer‐employee panel data
- No news may not be good news: A qualitative exploration of employee voice and leader responsiveness in Australian veterinary clinics
- What makes them move abroad? Reviewing and exploring differences between self-initiated and assigned expatriation
- Employee recruitment and job search: Towards a multi-level integration
- The relative roles of engagement and embeddedness in predicting job performance and intention to leave
- Organizational Tenure and Job Performance
- Staying and performing
- The influence of supervisory‐support climate and unemployment rate on part‐time employee retention
- Stuck in a job: being "locked-in" or at risk of becoming locked-in at the workplace and well-being over time. [europepmc]
- Perceived Work Conditions and Turnover Intentions: The Mediating Role of Meaning of Work. [europepmc]
- Workplace Ostracism Seen through the Lens of Power. [europepmc]
- Is It Me or You?-How Reactions to Abusive Supervision Are Shaped by Leader Behavior and Follower Perceptions. [europepmc]
- Interpersonal Fairness, Willingness-to-Stay and Organisation-Based Self-Esteem: The Mediating Role of Affective Commitment. [europepmc]
- Job Lock, Work, and Psychological Well-being in the United States. [europepmc]
- Effectiveness of Psychological Capital Intervention and Its Influence on Work-Related Attitudes: Daily Online Self-Learning Method and Randomized Controlled Trial Design. [europepmc]
- Factors Affecting Staff Turnover of Young Academics: Job Embeddedness and Creative Work Performance in Higher Academic Institutions. [europepmc]
- Pay for performance, satisfaction and retention in longitudinal crowdsourced research. [europepmc]
- The Inhibitory Effect of Perceived Organizational Politics on Employee Voice Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model. [europepmc]
- Cultivating Proactive Career Behavior: The Role of Career Adaptability and Job Embeddedness. [europepmc]
- My Work Is Meaningless: The Consequences of Perceived Occupational Stigma for Employees in High-Prestige Occupations. [europepmc]
- Effects of the areas of worklife on job embeddedness: a national cross-sectional study among Egyptian nurses. [europepmc]
- The impact of transformational leadership on the turnover intention of the new generation of knowledgeable employees: A moderated mediation model. [europepmc]
- Relative Importance of Incivility and Loneliness in Occupational Health Outcomes. [europepmc]
- Nurse practice environment, perceived organizational support, general well-being, occupational burnout and turnover intention: A moderated multi-mediation model. [europepmc]
- Heterogeneity of work alienation and its relationship with job embeddedness among Chinese nurses: a cross-sectional study using latent profile analysis. [europepmc]
- The role of the nursing work environment, head nurse leadership and presenteeism in job embeddedness among new nurses: a cross-sectional multicentre study. [europepmc]
- Hospital doctor turnover and retention: a systematic review and new research pathway. [europepmc]
- Job crafting, positive psychological capital, and social support as predictors of job embeddedness on among clinical nurses- a structural model design. [europepmc]
- The impact of perceived organizational justice on young nurses' job performance: a chain mediating role of organizational climate and job embeddedness. [europepmc]
- An Empirical Study on Corporate ESG Behavior and Employee Satisfaction: A Moderating Mediation Model. [europepmc]
- The Effect of Job Skill Demands Under Artificial Intelligence Embeddedness on Employees' Job Performance: A Moderated Double-Edged Sword Model. [europepmc]
- Work engagement, resilience and turnover intentions among nurses: a mediation analysis. [europepmc]
- Nurses' Self-Efficacy, Job Embeddedness, and Psychological Empowerment: A Cross-Sectional Study. [europepmc]
Related