Individual intention to stay and embeddedness: exploring the case of a ballet company

Despite a large number of studies conducted on voluntary turnover, new studies on why people decide to stay in an organization may be needed, since factors that compel employees to stay could differ from those that motivate them to quit. Consistently, researchers have turned the question from why do people leave to why do they stay. For example, Mitchell and his colleagues introduced a new construct, job embeddedness, to provide a new outlook to answer the question “why people stay” . Several researchers have subsequently contributed to the further investigation of this construct. However, they did not address the issue of how job embeddedness may influence individuals' intention to stay in an organization. As a result, several questions still remain unanswered. For example, how do different dimensions of job embeddedness affect individuals' intention to stay in an organization? Do they have the same relevance? Does their relevance change over time? We will try to answer some of these questions by presenting an explorative study we conducted on the factors affecting the intention to stay of the dancers of a ballet company that is the Italy's most famous ballet company and one of the European most renowned contemporary ones. Our investigation suggests that different types and dimensions of embeddedness do not affect employees' intention to stay in the same way. On the opposite, we identified three different combinations there are different combinations, which depend on some individual characteristics like organizational tenure, professional experience, and personal status.