The impact of organisational shocks on the job embeddedness of professionals

Abstract

In a knowledge-based economy, the retention of professionals is critical to the longterm sustainability of organisations. The reason employees stay in organisations is not the same reason they leave. Job embeddedness is a third order construct that contains variables of fit, links and sacrifice in the second order and community and organisation in the first order, which provides an indicator whether employees are embedded and therefore inclined to stay in organisations. Organisational shocks are jarring events that affect employees. Shocks should affect the intention of employees to leave an organisation and therefore impact the job embeddedness of an employee. This study was concerned with quantifying the impact that organisational shocks had on the job embeddedness of professionals. A sample of 548 engineers was sampled from a state-owned organisation experiencing organisational shocks, through a self-administered questionnaire. The data was then statistically analysed with IBM¨ SPSS¨ Statistics 25 software and results presented for the main and sub-hypothesis associated with the impact of organisational shocks on job embeddedness. The study showed that organisational shocks was positively correlated to intention to turnover. The relationship between organisational shocks and job embeddedness covary. Fit explained the highest variance of job embeddedness during organisational shocks whilst sacrifice explained the second highest. Links explained a negligible amount of variance and did not correlate to organisational shocks indicating independence and a possibility of being a buffer to shocks.