Developing and refining links as a representation of organizational connection

Abstract

Job embeddedness is a construct that attempts to explain voluntary employee turnover not from the lens of why people choose to leave, but why they choose to stay (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001). The current research explores the role of links, a dimension of job embeddedness that quantitatively measures ties to individuals or activities (Lee, Mitchell, Sablynski, Burton, & Holtom, 2004), in predicting turnover intentions. More specifically, the study provides three notable contributions to the understanding of the embeddedness construct and the study of turnover more broadly. First, links were categorized into three types: tenure, relationship, and involvement. Findings suggest that relationship and involvement link types provide no incremental predictability of turnover intentions over that of tenure links alone – when measured using only quantitative measures as proposed by the job embeddedness scale (Mitchell et al., 2001). Second, findings found that quality link measures are meaningful predictors of turnover intentions and there is no interaction between quality and quantity links. Third, analysis of whether links mediate the relationship between personality and turnover intention show that all three quality link types and quantity tenure links possess significant indirect effects. These findings highlight some previous misconceptions of links and provide direction on how links can be used in the future to study turnover.