Una proposta di dialogo tra studi organizzativi e geografico-economici sul tema della employee retention

This article reviews the literature on job embeddedness (i.e. organizational and community embeddedness), which has been extensively analyzed as a determinant of intention to stay and voluntary turnover, and proposes a dialogue between organization (HRM) studies and economic geography (urban studies). By clarifying how the focus moved from the issue of why people leave organizations to why people remain, it analyzes the overlaps and complementarity between the community embeddedness literature and the literature on workers’ locational choices in economic geography. Results point to the importance of investigating off-the-job factors (amenities, relationships with local members, ‘third’ places) in understanding why people are retained into organizations, and of taking into appropriate consideration the intermediating role that organizations could have for enhancing the retention capacities of territories. Research and managerial implications are discussed.