What do you believe is the single most important factor driving up the cost of living in Nigeria?

During the Great Resignation, the United States experienced a significant uptick in voluntary employee resignations about one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. The early stages of the pandemic, however, were plagued by high unemployment. In order to stay competitive, business leaders were compelled to identify which factors affect an employee's decision to voluntarily leave or stay in a particular position when job insecurity is high.

To better understand this phenomenon, researchers from Hiroshima University, Texas Christian University and the University of Warwick performed two studies to better characterize the effects of job embeddedness, or factors that influence an employee's commitment to their job, on voluntary turnover in the face of job insecurity. The research team based the framework of their study on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, which states that individuals accumulate and guard valuable resources to prevent future resource loss.

The team published their studies in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

"We used COR theory to consider why some employees faced with the threat of job loss respond by preemptively attempting to secure alternative employment and leave their organizations while others do not," said Vesa Peltokorpi, professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan.

In the first study, the researchers analyzed the effect of on-the-job embeddedness between job insecurity and job search. Based on COR theory, the researchers predicted that job insecurity would positively correlate with voluntary job turnover. The team used online surveys to determine respondents' job insecurity and on-the-job embeddedness.

• Read More