Job Embeddedness
Job embeddedness is a new construct developed by Mitchell et al. (2001), it represents a combination of factors that influence an employee’s decision to remain in or leave the organization. This approach of turnover focused on the factors that make an individual more likely to stay in the job, or leave an organization. This approach built on the earlier turnover models and added a new dimension to our understanding of turnover (Ramesh, 2007).
On the other hand, Mitchell and Lee (2001) define job embeddedness as a multidimensional construct that focuses on the factors that make an individual more likely to stay in the job, namely the work, social, and non-work attachments that are developed over a period of time. Individuals with more types of restraining forces are more embedded and less likely to voluntarily exit the organization (Sekiguch et al., 2008), while Yancey (2009) defined job embeddedness as the combined forces which keep a person from leaving his or her job.
Job embeddedness is characterized by three sub-dimensions: (a) the extent to which people have links to other people or activities inside and outside the organization, (b) the extent to which their jobs and communities fit other aspects in their “life spaces”, and (c) what they would give up if they left their present settings (Mitchell et al., 2001). These three sub-dimensions are considered in two over-arching dimensions: an employee’s organization (on-the-job) and community (off-the-job), generating the six dimensions of the job embeddedness construct: links-organization, links-community, fit-organization, fit-community, sacrifice-organization and sacrifice community (Bergiel et al., 2009).
This study focuses only on-the-job dimensions of embeddedness, because organizational aspects and practice especially internal marketing is more related to on the job factors, so off-the-job embeddedness (community embeddedness) is irrelevant in this study.