Organizational and Occupational Embeddedness of Federal Law Enforcement Personnel

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among identification, embeddedness, and turnover intentions at the organizational and occupational levels. Design/methodology/approach—Over 1,100 members of the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations completed an on-line survey. The sample included Agents and staff who were officers, enlisted, and civilians. Findings Measures of fit, sacrifice, and links were positively related to organizational embeddedness. Organizational and occupational embeddedness were negatively related to turnover intentions. Organizational and occupational identification were negatively related to turnover intentions. Embeddedness fully mediated the relationship between identification and turnover intentions at the organizational level and partially mediated the relationship between identification and turnover intentions at the occupational level. Implications Turnover can be expensive in organizations where training costs are high. Understanding embeddedness may help practitioners reduce turnover costs. Combining models of embeddedness and identification can help researchers understand the mechanisms by which employees are rooted in organizations, and organizations are rooted in employees. Originality/value This paper is one of very few papers that have examined job embeddedness in law enforcement organizations, or occupational embeddedness in any organization. This is one of the first studies to examine the relationships among identification, embeddedness and turnover intentions. The paper demonstrated the value of adding identification to the job embeddedness model.