Chris Leupold, associate professor of psychology, presented a paper at the 2011 Southern Management Association meeting in Savannah, Ga. The manuscript, " To Stay or To Go?: The Roles of Job Embeddedness and Correlate Factors in Retail Pharmacists’ Intentions to Leave” was published in the proceedings of the annual meeting.
This research was a collaboration between Leupold and his former student, Lauren Ellis ’09. While at Elon, Ellis was an Honors Fellow and this research was part of her thesis requirement. The paper describes the current staffing challenges employers face in retaining retail pharmacists, as well as the problem of projected shortages of pharmacists in the near future. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact certain variables had on pharmacists’ intentions to stay with or leave their current employers.
Leupoldserves as Elon’s Faculty Leadership Fellow and coordinator of the leadership studies minor. Ellis is completing her second year of doctoral work in industrial-organizational psychology at Clemson University.
ABSTRACT
An increasingly studied variable in turnover research, job embeddedness refers to the forces that lead an employee to remain with his current organization (Mitchell et al., 2001). Data from a national sample of retail pharmacists indicated a significant positive relationship between participants’ job embeddedness and their intentions to leave. Analyses also found job embeddedness to be significantly related to the dispositional variable, core self evaluation; and the organizational attitude variables, perceived organizational support and job satisfaction. Organizations’ proactive retention-related activities did mitigate pharmacists’ intention to leave. Implications for retail pharmacist employers are discussed.