Embeddedness and the International Workforce: Stylized Facts and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Job embeddedness (JE) theory is concerned with forces that keep an employee from leaving his or her job, while binding him or her to the organization, the location, people and issues at work. Presently, scholars increasingly pay attention to the JE of expatriates in order to explain retention in the host organization. Until today, this vein of research has brought various insights that are difficult to overview. Especially, what the relatively stable general patterns in this research field are cannot easily be understood. For this reason, I applied the stylized facts (SFs) method, a tool to structure an academic body of knowledge, in order to identify the stable and reproducible results of preliminary studies. I aggregated these findings and built five SFs. These are (i) ‘JE increases expatriates’ retention in the host organization’, (ii) ‘Home country pulls decrease expatriates’ retention’, (iii) ‘Expatriates trust and relationship building with co-workers increase JE’, (iv) ‘JE increases the career expectations of expatriates’ and (v) ‘JE increases the incorporation of an international self-concept’. With this work, I structure the current state of research and provide a ground for further academic discourse.