What's culture got to do with it? Examining job embeddedness and organizational commitment and turnover intentions in South Africa

Abstract

Using a longitudinal design this study examines the relationship between job embeddedness, organizational commitment and turnover intentions using a sample of South African professionals. Results show that job embeddedness had a positive relationship on organizational commitment and a negative relationship on turnover intentions. Furthermore, we find that this relationship was moderated by employees' cultural values, specifically, collectivism and power distance. The results of this research provide new insights into the generalizability of job embeddedness theory to non-Western countries, such as South Africa. The study also extends extant embeddedness theory to understand how employee individual differences, in particular cultural values, influence the relationship between job embeddedness and employees' job attitudes.