Will they stay or will they go? The role of job embeddedness in predicting turnover in individualistic and collectivistic cultures.

Abstract

Although turnover is an issue of global concern, paradoxically there have been few studies of turnover across cultures. We investigated the cross-cultural generalizability of the job embeddedness model (Mitchell & Lee, 2001) by examining turnover in an individualistic country (United States) and a collectivistic country (India). Using cross-cultural data from call centers (N = 797), we demonstrated that although organization job embeddedness predicted turnover in both countries, different dimensions of job embeddedness predicted turnover in the United States and India. As hypothesized, on the basis of individualism-collectivism theory, person-job fit was a significant predictor of lower turnover in the United States, whereas person-organization fit, organization links, and community links were significant predictors of lower turnover in India. We also explored whether a newly developed construct of embeddedness-family embeddedness-predicts turnover above and beyond job embeddedness and found initial support for its utility in both the United States and India. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.