Are embedded employees active or passive? The roles of learning goal orientation and preferences for wide task boundaries and job mobility in the embeddedness–voice link

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21898
• Author: Lorenzo Lucianetti,Thomas W. H. Ng
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Are embedded employees active or passive? The roles

of learning goal orientation and preferences for wide task

boundaries and job mobility in the embeddedness–voice link

Thomas W. H. Ng

1

| Lorenzo Lucianetti

2

1

University of Hong Kong

2

University of Chieti and Pescara, Pescara,

Italy

Correspondence

Thomas W. H. Ng, University of Hong Kong,

Faculty of Business and Economics, Pok Fu

Lam, Hong Kong.

Email: tng@business.hku.hk

Does embedding employees in their organizations turn them into active organizational mem-

bers who are increasingly interested in improvement, or passive members who increasingly lose

interest in improvement? Addressing this embeddedness dilemma, this study aims to examine

why and when perceived organizational embeddedness relates to the psychological orientation

toward improvement that in turn relates to such improvement-oriented behavior as voice. First,

based on the future time perspective, we posit that increasingly embedded employees antici-

pate that their futures will be intertwined with that of their organizations, thereby motivating

them to demonstrate increased learning goal orientation, which in turn promotes voice behav-

ior. Second, this mediating relationship is less likely to occur for those who experience stronger

increases in preferences for wide task boundaries and preferences for job mobility. Such pref-

erences create a short-term future time perspective in an employment relationship that is not

aligned with the long-term future time perspective inherent in increased embeddedness. Longi-

tudinal data collected from 267 Italian employees over an eight-month period provide empirical

support for the proposed moderated mediation relationships.

KEYWORDS

embeddedness, job mobility, learning goal orientation, moderated mediation, voice

1|INTRODUCTION

Employee retention has long been one of the most important con-

cerns among HR practitioners (Chang, Wang, & Huang, 2013; Haus-

knecht, Rodda, & Howard, 2009; Soltis, Agneessens, Sasovova, &

Labianca, 2013). One effective retention strategy that has been

widely advocated is to make employees feel embedded (Allen & Sha-

nock, 2013; Tanova & Holtom, 2008). Perceived organizational

embeddedness (POE), or the extent to which employees feel they are

enmeshed in their organizations, in fact, leads to lower employee

turnover (Jiang, Liu, McKay, Lee, & Mitchell, 2012; Mitchell, Holtom, &

Lee, 2001). However, an unresolved question in this area of research

is whether increased POE enhances or stifles employees' interest in

improvement. For HR practitioners, this is an especially important

question to resolve because employees' interest in improvement and

learning can directly determine an organization's overall learning

capacity (Camps, Oltra, Aldas-Manzano, Buenaventura-Vera, &

Torres-Carballo, 2016; Simonin & Ozsomer, 2009), thereby affecting

organizational performance in the long run.

The most favorable HR scenario is that increasingly embedded

employees become increasingly interested in skill improvement and

knowledge enhancement. These employees have identified their

workplace as one with which they feel comfortable developing a

long-term relationship, and feel increasingly motivated to help

improve the performance of the firm, the fate of which is now inter-

twined with theirs. A highly unfavorable HR scenario, however, is also

plausible. This occurs when increasingly embedded employees

become increasingly passive and gradually lose interest in improving

their skills and knowledge, as their stable work setting may discour-

age them from setting ambitious goals (Ng & Feldman, 2010).

To understand which HR scenario is more likely to occur, we pro-

pose two ways in which the foregoing contradictory views about

embedded employees' interests in improvement (which we hereafter

call “the embeddedness dilemma”) can be resolved. First, HR

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21898

Hum Resour Manage. 2018;57:1251–1269. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1251

practitioners must understand whether and why increased POE is

related to an increased orientation toward improvement. Direct evi-

dence that increased POE is related to the growth of such a psycho-

logical tendency could dispel negative views. The first goal of the

current study, then, is to examine whether increases in POE are

related to increases in learning goal orientation (LGO). These

increases are in turn linked to voice, which can be viewed as an

improvement-oriented behavior intended to help the organization.

LGO is the extent to which one is motivated to master new skills and

knowledge (Elliot & Dweck, 1988; Seijts, Latham, Tasa, & Latham,

2004), and has attracted growing attention from HR practitioners

(De Clercq, Rahman, & Belausteguigoitia, 2017; Jones, Davis, &

Thomas, 2017; London & Sessa, 2007). LGO precisely captures

employees' interest in long-term improvement. Other constructs,

such as organizational commitment and work engagement, do not

capture long-term improvement orientation.

Second, HR practitioners must understand the conditions that

lead employees to react to increased POE with in creased proactiv-

ity, and those that lead to increased passivity. A ke y reason for the

emergence of the embeddedness dilemma is that increased POE

lengthens an employee' s anticipated relati onship with a firm, which

may be appealing to some but not others. The two main factors that

determine whether people react positively or negatively to the

anticipation of a long- term employment relat ionship with one

employer are preferences for wide task boundaries (PWTB) and

preferences for job mobilit y (PJM). These preferences r epresent a

desire to go beyond one's c omfort zone and extend wor k experi-

ences to include new tasks, colleagues, and organizations. These

diverse experiences ar e especially useful for in creasing one's

employability in today's labor market (Ellig, 1998; Heijde & Van Der

Heijden, 2006).

We argue that these two factors can alter the effects of POE on

LGO. Although increased POE lengthens an employee's anticipated

relationship with the firm and therefore increases their learning orien-

tation, increased PWTB and PJM might turn employees' attention to

outside opportunities. For instance, Rodriques, Guest, Oliveira, and

Alfes (2015) found that employees who reported greater PWTB had

lower affective commitment. When employees adopt a short-term

perspective in an employment relationship, it counteracts the effects

of POE on employees' LGO. Thus, PWTB and PJM attenuate the

POE–LGO–voice sequence.

This study contributes to the literature in several important ways.

First, it is important that we help HR practitioners to resolve the

embeddedness dilemma, as mixed evidence of reactions to POE has

been produced (e.g., Bambacas & Kulik, 2013; Marasi, Cox, & Ben-

nett, 2016). These mixed results might increase HR practitioners'

doubts about the effectiveness of an embeddedness HR strategy,

which has been widely advocated by academics (Holtom & Inderrie-

den, 2006). We need to resolve these mixed findings or perspectives

to show the utility of this retention strategy to HR practitioners. For

instance, if increasingly embedded employees gradually lose interest

in making improvements, their organizations suffer, as workers

become increasingly passive contributors who are unlikely to leave.

In that scenario, the hidden cost of an embeddedness HR strategy

could be much higher than first presumed.

Theoretically speaking, this study also extends Ng and Feldman's

(2013) study. These authors test the direct relationship between POE

and voice without demonstrating any mediating or moderating mech-

anisms. Moreover, they test the relationship with a U.S. sample, like

much of the research on embeddedness. This study was conducted in

Italy, a country that has a different cultural profile than the United

States (Hofstede, 1980, 2001). Ramesh and Gelfand (2010) also call

for more research on the influences of POE in other nations. More

importantly, Italy is an especially interesting context in which to

examine the embeddedness dilemma because of the recent concern

about its low labor productivity (Lucidi & Kleinknecht, 2010). An

attempt to understand whether embedded Italian workers are more

or less interested in improvement-oriented behavior might help clar-

ify why the productivity of Italian workers has decreased.

In addition, this study also contributes to the voice literature.

Examining LGO as a predictor of voice helps identify a knowledge-

enhancement motive of such behavior, which has been largely

neglected in the current research on voice (Chamberlin, Newton, &

LePine, in press). We argue that there are a variety of reasons why

learning-oriented employees are more likely to engage in voice for

the sake of improvement; for instance, they may see voice as a way

to strengthen their knowledge of work processes.

This article is structured in the following way. First, we address

the nature of POE. Next, we examine the mediating effects of LGO

in the POE–voice relationship. Then, we consider the moderating

effects of PWTB and PJM. Finally, we discuss our empirical findings.

We focus on changes in variables throughout the study, as the POE-

voice relationship is likely to fluctuate over time (Morrison, 2011;

Ng & Feldman, 2012, 2013). For the sake of simplicity, our theoretical

focus is on increases in the study constructs over time, but this per-

spective can be easily reversed to reflect decreases.

2|THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.1 |The nature of POE

Retaining employees in a labor market characterized by a strength-

ened norm of job mobility is a growing HR challenge (Deckop, Kon-

rad, Perlmutter, & Freely, 2006; Hausknecht et al., 2009). As a result,

the embeddedness HR strategy has attracted the attention of both

researchers and practitioners in recent years (Holtom, Mitchell,

Lee, & Eberly, 2008). Job embeddedness consists of three primary

forces (fit, links, and sacrifice) that enmesh employees in their organi-

zations (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, & Erez, 2001). Employees

also formulate perceptions of that embeddedness (Crossley, Bennett,

Jex, & Burnfield, 2007), and Ng and Feldman (2010, 2012, 2013)

extend this perceptual approach to examine the POE construct.

This study uses the perceptual approach for two reasons. First, it

examines whether employees react to embeddedness with an

increased interest in improvement, a research question that requires

us to examine the subjective perceptions of embeddedness. If

employees do not feel they are embedded, then it is not meaningful

to address how they react to that embeddedness. Second, as is sub-

sequently explained, increased embeddedness affects employees by

1252 NG AND LUCIANETTI