Job embeddedness and the psychological contract of the future

The employment goals of most organizations include attracting, developing, motivating, and retaining a talented workforce. An important reason to monitor, understand, and actively manage the psychological contract is to enable the fulfillment of these goals. A potentially costly consequence of psychological contract breach is voluntary employee turnover. In the past two decades, job embeddedness, a leading theory of employee turnover, has been developed and tested extensively. Much is known from empirical research about the common antecedents and consequences of the psychological contract and job embeddedness. This chapter carefully examines this overlap and identifies ways to leverage understanding at this important intersection to guide researchers and practitioners who seek to empower leaders to intervene strategically. Given evolving employment forms and rapidly advancing technology, it is timely to assess the positive and negative impacts of these changes on the psychological contract and job embeddedness.