Employee Job Embeddedness and Retention Strategy Effectiveness in a Summer School Population

Abstract

The ever-important issue of employee turnover has led to countless theories explaining its antecedents. While most only have modest predictive ability, job embeddedness, a construct which measures six community and organisational factors, which are said to prevent an employee leaving, boasts predictive ability above and beyond the traditional models preceding it. The construct has only been applied in a limited number of contexts as a result of its infancy and, as such, this study presents findings from a new context, UK English foreign language (EFL) summer schools for children.The research focuses on two aspects within the schools, the employees and the retentions strategies designed to keep them in their jobs. Employee turnover in the EFL summer camps industry was found to be 51.8%. The costs, both financial and non-financial are sgnificant, yet literature in the industry is sparce. In being able to apply a new concept to a new and under-studied industry, the research is able to address two problems simultaneously. The resulting objectives of the study, therefore, were to measure embeddedness in employees and retention strategies while comparing, contrasting and evaluating retention strategy effectiveness. Finally an analysis of the moderating factors which were present in the age, gender, marital status, tenure, occupation and summer school position was undertaken. In order to gather the required information, a questionnaire was designed to collect quantitative data on the three dimensions of job embeddedness and their organisational and community aspects. The survey was completed online by 54 employees and 17 organisations. The findings from the data analysis suggest that neither population showed strong embeddedness, that community links were stronger among male employees and that younger employees exhibited higher community sacrifice. The paper also provides specific retention strategies which may increase the level of job embeddedness and reduce turnover, while recommending that academia focuses more on the EFL industry and applying the concept of job embeddedness within it.