Person-Centered Approach to Job Embeddedness

With the introduction of job embeddedness theory, turnover research shifted away from the precursors of why people leave and focused on why people stay. Distinct from similar constructs, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, job embeddedness includes community-related issues in addition to job-related issues. While existing literature has evaluated alternate ways to measure the job embeddedness construct, variable-centered approaches continue to be utilized. This approach implicitly assumes that being high or low on job embeddedness perceptions in the form of an overall composite indicates that individuals perceive each aspect and their attachment ties similarly. Thus, this study advances the job embeddedness theoretical framework by engaging in a person-centered approach. This study found that the presumed underlying factors used to measure job embeddedness were best represented by a six-factor model through confirmatory factor analysis. In addition, this study conducted a latent profile analysis to examine patterns in response indicators within the sample data and found that distinct job embeddedness profiles emerged. These profiles showed unique patterns of job-based and non-job-based experiences that relate to staying on the job. Lastly, this study examined each job embeddedness profile and compared them with respect to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions.