Using job embeddedness factors to explain voluntary turnover in four European countries Cem Tanova a * and Brooks C. Holtom b a Faculty of Business and Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa, North Cyprus via Mersin 10; b McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA The aging of the European workforce coupled with existing deficits of skilled workers in vital sectors (e.g., information and communication technology) make the attraction and retention of skilled workers a critical strategic human resource management issue. The large-scale, multi-country study reported in this article investigates the causes of voluntary turnover. The study is based on a large European dataset that contains information about a wide variety of variables that have been shown to influence voluntary turnover. The results indicate that the traditional turnover model, where ease of movement and desirability of movement are regarded as important predictors of turnover, receives support. Importantly, the study also shows that a new theory of employee retention – job embeddedness – explains a significant amount of variance above and beyond the role of demographic and traditional variables. In sum, the evidence suggests that the turnover decision is not only about the individual’s attitudes towards work or about the actual opportunities in the labour market, but also job embeddedness. Keywords: job embeddedness; voluntary turnover; ease of movement; desire of movement Introduction The attraction, development and retention of skilled employees are critical issues for organizations and nations. While enlargement of the European Union and intensified European integration have introduced the possibility of greater labour mobility, there continue to be marked differences between the EU and United States. Data from Eurostat indicate that in a given year approximately 1% of the EU population changes region, compared with nearly 6% who moved from one county to another in the United States (Fuller 2002). The same dataset shows that Europeans are half as likely to change jobs as Americans in a given year. Given these differences between Europe and the United States and the fact that the vast majority of academic research on voluntary turnover has been published using models and samples from the United States, there is an urgent need to rigorously test the generalizability of these models in the European context. From the perspective of the organization, employee turnover creates both tangible and intangible costs. The tangible costs include recruitment, selection, training, adjustment time, possible product and/or service quality problems, and the costs of agency workers/temporary staff (Morrell, Loan-Clarke and Wilkinson 2004a). The intangible costs, which may be even more significant than the tangibles, involve the effect of turnover on organizational culture, employee morale, social capital and organizational memory (Morrell et al. 2004a). ISSN 0958-5192 print/ISSN 1466-4399 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09585190802294820 http://www.informaworld.com *Corresponding author. Email: cem.tanova@emu.edu.tr RIJH 329649—8/8/2008—MADHAVANS—305665———Style 2 The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 19, No. 9, September 2008, 1553–1568 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49