[1] Important components of fit between an employee and the organization include an individual's career goals, personal values, as well as more immediate job-specific factors such as job knowledge, demands, skills, and abilities.
In terms of an employee's surrounding environment, components of employee-community fit include weather, location, amenities, political climate, and availability of entertainment options.
[1] A second key aspect of job embeddedness is links, the number of connections (formal or informal) that a person has with the surrounding community and the organization itself.
These community-specific connections range from relationships with family members and non-work friends, to other off-the-job social institutions and the physical environment itself.
Community sacrifices might be the loss of a safe, attractive home, desirable neighborhood characteristics, non-work friends, or an easy commute.
[11] The developers of the composite scale designed the measure to quantify the six dimensions of job embeddedness: fit, sacrifice, and links, both on-the-job and off-the-job.
The more items endorsed by the examinee, the more embedded the individual is in the job, and higher levels of embeddedness imply a lower likelihood of quitting.
This is in direct contrast to the original composite measure, which was designed so that the item responses form or cause job embeddedness (a formative scale).
[13] In the global measure, instructions direct respondents to consider both work and non-work related factors, and rate their agreement with the following seven statements.
[11] This difference in scale (reflective versus formative) and whether to consider job embeddedness as an overall impression or the sum of its parts (global versus composite), has created some controversy among scholars in organizational behavior management and Industrial and organizational psychology as to which scale should be used to measure job embeddedness.
However, these scholars indicate that organizational identity deals with significance for the self, whereas, links-organization may encompass a broader non-emotional perception of one's connections to different aspects of the organizations.
In contrast, Zhang and colleagues[14] only chose to analyze the fit and sacrifice dimensions in their review of the uniqueness of job embeddedness.
They cited multiple studies, which support that fit and sacrifice, are highly related to one another that may indicate there is evidence against using these two facets to create four separate factors.
Others factors that determine the strength of the relationship between job embeddedness and turnover include gender, organizational type, and national culture.
Off-the-job embeddedness may contribute to withdrawal because an individual who is greatly occupied by non-work obligations may have less time to devote to work.
In either case, these cultural demands may supersede an individual's desire to leave or stay with an organization based on job embeddedness.
The authors specify that knowledge of off-the-job embeddedness in the Hispanic culture is especially relevant for organizations that may require long-distance job relocation.