The Mediating Role of Job Embeddedness Between Internal Marketing and Turnover Intention

Introduction

Since the mass layoffs of the 1970s, the careers literature has paid a great deal of attention to employees’ job mobility (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; Sullivan, 1999; Ng et al., 2005). However, over the past several years, an interesting alternative question has emerged: Why do people stay in their organizations and occupations even when other opportunities are available elsewhere? Beginning with the research on job embeddedness, scholars have been paying more and more attention to issues of job stability (Mitchell et al., 2001).

Previous research has revealed job embeddedness to be a more effective predictor of employee retention than any of the other variables utilized by all of the major turnover models, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job alternative variables (Holtom & O'Neill, 2004; Lee et al., 2004; Holtom & Inderrieden, 2006).

However, how job embeddedness (JE) is developed, or what factors cause employees embedded in their jobs to keep them from leaving the organization still requires investigation, a few studies focused on these factors (Bergiel et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2010), we suggest that internal marketing may be one of the factors that causes employees embedded, which in turn influences employees’ turnover intention.

The concept of internal marketing (IM) originated in the field of marketing research in the service industry (Berry, 1981; Grönroos, 1981), emphasizing that enterprises should value and respect their employees and regard them as internal customers. Internal marketing concept challenges traditional marketing methods, which focus on serving external customers only. The main objective of internal marketing is to help internal customers (employees) to gain greater job satisfaction, which should promote job performance and facilitate the organization accomplishing its ultimate business objectives (Chang & Chang, 2007). Some researchers sustain that the IM objective is selling the firms to their employees by identifying and satisfying their needs as individuals and service providers (Vary, 1995), in order to get that they become really conscious of their services performance, IM also is a way to develop customer-oriented dynamic teams (Vasconcelos, 2008).

The goal of the present study is to examine the relationship between internal marketing and job embeddedness and the mediating role of job embeddedness in the relationship between internal marketing and intention to turnover.