What Keeps You in Your Job?
Why people stay in jobs they do not love, and leave jobs they like
For decades, research on why people quit looked mostly at one thing: whether they were happy at work. Then a group of management researchers asked the opposite question - why do people stay? - and found a web of reasons that have little to do with job satisfaction. How well the job and the town suit you. How many people and commitments you are tied to. What you would lose by walking away. Together they form what the researchers called embeddedness, and it predicted who would leave better than satisfaction alone.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your current job and the place where you live now. If you are between jobs, think about your most recent one.
What it measures
The three strands of job embeddedness, each covering both the job and the community around it: fit (how well the work and the place suit you), links (the people and commitments you are tied to) and sacrifice (what you would give up by leaving). Our workplace fit test looks at which culture suits you; this one looks at what is actually holding you where you are.
Based on: Job embeddedness: fit, links and sacrifice (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski & Erez, 2001; Crossley et al., 2007)
Possible results
Fit
How well your job, your organisation and the place you live suit you.
Links
The colleagues, teams, family and commitments that connect you to your job and your area.
Sacrifice
What you would give up - money, perks, status, community - if you left.
Common questions
Is job embeddedness the same as job satisfaction?
No, and that was the point of the idea. The 2001 study found that embeddedness predicted who actually left over and above satisfaction, commitment and job search. You can be dissatisfied and deeply embedded - tied by links and sacrifice - or satisfied and barely embedded, ready to leave for a good offer.
Is it bad to feel stuck in a job?
It depends on what is doing the holding. Being held by fit and good relationships is usually a comfortable place to be. Being held mainly by what you would lose, while the work itself no longer suits you, is the combination most likely to wear you down. Naming which one applies is the first step towards deciding whether to stay on better terms or plan a way out.
Why does the community around my job count?
Because leaving a job often means leaving a place. The original researchers included off-the-job ties - a partner's career, children's schools, friends, a house you love - because these hold people just as firmly as anything in the office. Two people in the same job can be embedded to very different degrees because of their lives outside it.
Sources
- Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal. doi:10.2307/3069391
- Crossley, C. D., Bennett, R. J., Jex, S. M., & Burnfield, J. L. (2007). Development of a global measure of job embeddedness and integration into a traditional model of voluntary turnover. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.92.4.1031
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the published job embeddedness measures, so scores are not comparable to the published norms. The original work was done mainly with North American employees, and later research has argued about whether embeddedness is best measured as separate parts or as one overall feeling of being stuck. Embeddedness predicts staying, not wellbeing: a high score is not a sign your job is good for you.