Turnover in hotels: the role of transformational leadership, organizational & community embeddedness

Research in the last two decades suggests that job embeddedness may reduce employee turnover. However, little is known about whether this is the case in the hotel industry despite its high turnover rates. Besides, most studies have been conducted in the US, where the job embeddedness construct was developed and tested, suggesting the need to test the job embeddedness-turnover link in other contexts to improve its theoretical accuracy and generalizability. Additionally, while appropriate leader behaviors may enhance follower job embeddedness, empirical studies are sparse. Drawing from the Conservation of Resources theory, this study examines how transformational leaders may address hotel employee turnover by exploring organizational and community embeddedness. Following a bibliometric review of job embeddedness literature over the last 20 years and hypotheses development, data was collected from 312 hotel employees across 12 hotels in Ghana as part of a PhD project in the hotel industry. Using structural equation modelling techniques to confirm the study constructs and test the research model, the study found that at all levels of community embeddedness: high, average, and low, there was full mediation effect of organizational embeddedness on the transformational leadership-turnover relationship. Further, both transformational leadership and community embeddedness were found to positively relate to organizational embeddedness, which in turn related negatively to turnover. However, community embeddedness was not found to moderate the proposed relationship between transformational leadership and organizational embeddedness. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the development of embeddedness and turnover theory by understanding the critical role leaders play in motivating and retaining staff. The practical implications of these findings are discussed with suggestions for the hotel industry to develop better systems and incentives to retain talent.