Viewing Turnover through a Wide-Angle Lens: Conceptualizing Locality Turnover

Prior studies of employee turnover have inherently included employees who depart due to dissatisfaction with the locality of their employment, though the search for factors contributing to turnover generally ignores locality. We introduce the construct of "locality turnover" defined as an employee\´s voluntary departure from the region or district. In a field study of 244 workers, we examined the effect of organizational embeddedness and community embeddedness on intention to leave the locality. Results indicate community embeddedness fit, sacrifice, and links explain variance in locality turnover intention above and beyond the variance explained by organizational turnover intention.