Thinking job embeddedness not turnover: Towards a better understanding of frontline hotel worker retention

Highlight•Dimensionality of the job embeddedness survey validated on a sample of hotel frontline workers.•Findings indicate that a six factor solution is the best explanation of dimensionality.•Dimensions of organizational sacrifice and community links displayed a positive relationship with organizational commitment.•A negative relationship was found between organizational sacrifice and intentions to leave.•A positive relationship was found between community links and intentions to leave.

This article reports the findings of a study of 327 Australian hotel frontline employees using a survey of job embeddedness. The research provides a novel application of the job embeddedness construct to the hospitality industry, not only validating the factor structure of the job embeddedness scale, but also investigating the relationship between job embeddedness and other job-related attitudes that influence employee turnover. Findings indicated that a six factor solution is the best explanation. Testing a model of the embeddedness-commitment and embeddedness-turnover relationship, the embeddedness dimensions of organizational sacrifice and community links displayed a positive relationship with organizational commitment. A negative relationship was found between organizational sacrifice and intentions to leave, while a positive relationship was found between community links and intentions to leave. One implication for hospitality managers is that there is an opportunity for hotel organizations to increase the job embeddedness of their employees by increasing the perceived costs of leaving.