The Effect of Job Embeddedness on the Propensity to Leave—Mediating Role Based on Perception of Organizational Support

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of the knowledge economy and the intense dynamic environment, the business community has gradually realized that attaching importance to talent cultivation, strengthening the connection between employees and the enterprise, promoting the play of employees’ personal subjective initiative, and meeting the material and spiritual needs of employees are the prerequisites for the sustained and stable development of the enterprise, and also key factors in promoting the achievement of the enterprise’s performance objectives. The frequent loss of enterprise personnel, on the one hand, leads to the generation of unstable factors in the organization, and on the other hand, directly leads to the rise of enterprise manpower costs, which seriously threatens the survival and development of enterprises. In view of this, the research objectives of this paper are as follows: (1) To test the impact of respondents’ job embeddedness on turnover inclination. (2) To test the impact of respondents’ job embeddedness on the sense of organizational support and its dimensions. (3) To test the effect of respondents’ sense of organizational support and its dimensions on employees’ tendency to leave. (4) To test the mediating role of respondents’ sense of organizational support and its dimensions in the relationship between job embeddedness and employees’ tendency to leave. (5) To test the difference between job embeddedness, sense of organizational support, and turnover propensity on demographic variables.

This study takes organizational support theory, social exchange theory, and job embeddedness theory as its theoretical basis. Based on the matching, correlation, and embeddedness between organizations and employees, and adding the dual-path perspective of organizational support as a mediating variable, a survey was conducted on 480 employees of small and medium-sized private enterprises in Hebei Province.

After the questionnaires were collected, 425 valid questionnaires were obtained after excluding invalid questionnaires such as wrongly filled in and omitted. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were conducted by using SPSS statistical software.

The results of the empirical study show that (1) job embeddedness has a significant negative effect on employees’ turnover intention; (2) job embeddedness has a positive contribution to the sense of organizational support and its dimensions (corporate support, colleague support, and leadership support). (3) Sense of organizational support and its dimensions have a significant negative effect on employees’ intention to leave. (4) Perceived organizational support and its dimensions (corporate support, coworker support, and leadership support) play a partial mediating role in the study of job embeddedness and employees’ turnover intention. (5) Gender, age educational background, and other factors in respondents’ demographic variables were not tested for differences in job embeddedness, organizational support, and employee turnover intention variables. Based on the empirical findings, this paper proposes effective employee incentives and employee retention policy recommendations for human resource management in small and medium-sized enterprises in Hebei Province.

Keywords: job embedded, sense of organizational support, tendency to leave human resource management.

The Effect of Job Embeddedness on the Propensity to Leave—Mediating Role Based on Perception of Organizational Support

Master of Business Administration (International Program), Siam University, Bangkok, Thailand