Examining Job Embeddedness Survey Items For An Adventure Education Population

Abstract

Dysfunctional voluntary employee turnover is an issue that leads to major direct and indirect costs (e.g., Sagie, Birati, & Tziner, 2002). Although job satisfaction has classically been the predominant construct used to explain turnover, recently a new construct, job embeddedness, has been relatively successful at helping explain additional variance in turnover beyond the traditional constructs, such as job satisfaction (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001). In contrast to job satisfaction which is an attitudinal construct focusing on an individual‟s orientation toward his or her job, job embeddedness is a construct looking at the connections that bind individuals to their job, organization of employment, and community. Therefore, job embeddedness‟ focus is larger than job satisfaction‟s and job embeddedness is more than just an attitudinal construct. From the practitioner perspective, this construct suggests multiple turnover reduction strategies (e.g., Holtom, Mitchell, & Lee, 2006). However, authors such as Holtom, et al. (2006) recommend that managers need to understand how and to what extent their employees are currently embedded in order to most effectively design and implement job embeddedness based retention strategies.

A number of survey items have been used to measure job embeddedness with previous populations of workers. This collection of survey items has resulted in strong construct and criterion validation evidence; however, the literature has reported very little content validation evidence (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, et al., 2001).

It is the original study‟s (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, et al., 2001) survey item‟s lack of content validation evidence with any similar types of workers that raises questions about the validity of using these items to measure job embeddedness in an adventure education (AE) instructor population.

This study used an expert panel and multiple waves of cognitive interviews. These methods resulted in evidence that supports the hypothesis that the original set of survey items fail to accurately measure the most important parts of the job embeddedness domain for seasonal AE instructors. A preliminary set of seasonal AE instructor items were developed.