Matt Valle, associate professor of business administration, and Chris Leupold, assistant professor of psychology, have had their manuscript, “Holding On and Letting Go: The Relationship Between Job Embeddedness and Turnover Among PEM Physicians,” accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Inquiry.
The study, co-authored with Kerry Leupold, a physician in UMDNJ’s Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, surveyed a national sample of pediatric emergency physicians to identify the specific personal, job, and organizational factors that impacted their perceived intent to stay in their current roles.
Creating a composite measure for the variable job embededdness, a construct which describes the degree of “hold” a certain position has on an individual, the authors found that physicians’ degree of job embededdness did significantly predict their intent to leave within both two-year and five-year timeframes. Specifically, it was found that fit with the job was the strongest determinent of embededdness, followed by the strength of links to others in the organization, and the sacrifices inherent in job change.
Implications for healthcare managers are discussed which highlight a shift from determining affective reactions to work, to understanding how job embeddedness can explain physicians’ decisions to stay with, or leave, an organization.