Developing organisational embeddedness: employee personality and social networking

Abstract

While research has supported the contention that organisational embeddedness can influence voluntary turnover, little research examines how employees develop embeddedness. Understanding how employees develop embeddedness, however, is important to deal with the costly issue of voluntary turnover. This paper suggests that the personality traits of conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion can predict embeddedness and that social networking can also shape organisational embeddedness. Embeddedness is expected to negatively impact turnover intentions in turn. Data were collected through self-reported questionnaires (n = 401) in service sector companies in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad. A research design with three waves was used to test the proposed research model. The findings suggest that the personality dimensions of conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion predict organisational embeddedness, that social networking impacts embeddedness and that embeddedness predicts intent to turnover. Implications, limitations and future research directions offered by these findings are also discussed.