Employee Job Embeddedness and Retention Strategy Effectiveness in a Summer School Population
Citation
(2015) Employee Job Embeddedness and Retention Strategy Effectiveness in a Summer School Population, no. 145.
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.