VALIDITY EVIDENCE OF AN OCCUPATIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS MEASURE

Abstract

What we know about the factors that leave people feeling stuck to their jobs, organizations and occupations cannot simply be explained by attitudinal constructs like involvement and commitment alone, as they are linked to more than only the job or work. The need to understand and study the construct of occupational embeddedness is directly tied to the progress of our economy, work, culture, communities, families and individuals, by understanding the collection of forces that keep people in their present occupations. This study used scale measures established in previous literature that include similar and dissimilar constructs to occupational embeddedness (OES) to provide evidence of convergent and discriminant validity of an existing, newly developed measure of occupational embeddedness. A sample of 216 working professionals (mostly from a training and organizational development professional organization) was drawn from a Midwestern sector of a national training organization, as well as a local networking organization. As hypothesized and tested via bivariate correlations for each of the eight measures of interest, the dimensions of the occupational embeddedness scale measure provided convergent validity evidence when correlated with measures such as occupational commitment (affective, normative and continuance), occupational withdrawal cognitions, and occupational tenure. As hypothesized, discriminant validity evidence was provided as the measure of social desirability contains items with a small relationship to the content of the items measuring the construct of occupational embeddedness. Study limitations and implications for future research are discussed.