An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Leader-member Exchange And On-the-job Embeddedness

In the era of knowledge economy, the departure of key employees will lead to the direct economic losses of the company. Some studies have shown that staff turnover costs 17% of pre-tax income of the company, so a lot of researches have done on the issue of why the employees leave and how to prevent turnover. But the traditional attitude variable is limited to explain the reason. In order to better explain the reason, Mitehell and his partners put forward that job embeddedness from social network theory in 2001, which is now widely used to explain the turnover behavior of the employees. According to the theory, the organization is just like a web which makes the members sink into it, and the members of the organization can establish a number of close social connections with the organization, and then make the employees stay in the organization even a better opportunity provided to them. Besides, the study has certified that job embeddedness help to improve the employee’s commitment to the organization, to promote employee’s organizational citizenship behavior and innovation behavior.Under this condition, how to improve the level of employee’s job embeddedness is a topic of great concern in practice. But previous studies mostly focused on the relationship between job embeddedness and outcome variables. Concerning the antecedents of job embeddedness, the research is still relatively small, and current study pays little attention to the mechanism of how job embeddedness influences other variables. On the basis of literature review and the specific characteristics of our country, this dissertation aims to study the relationship between the Leader-member exchange and on-the-job embeddedness, and the mediating effect of organizational identification.This dissertation is made up of five parts. The dissertation firstly discusses the research background of LMX, organizational identification, and on-the-job embeddedness, and put forward the method will be used to study the related variables. Then the second part reviews the literature about LMX, on-the-job embeddedness and organizational identification. The third part explains the hypotheses used to study the relationship between LMX, organizational identification and on-the-job embeddedness and the measures of them. The fourth part is data analysis in which the dissertation analyzes and verifies the relationship between LMX and on-the-job Embeddedness, and the role of organizational identification between them. The fifth part is the research conclusion and suggestion. This section summarizes the conclusions of previous research, that is, the LMX has a significant positive impact on the job embeddedness. High quality leader member exchange relationship can help employees to identify the organization, and thus promote on-the job embeddedness of employees. On this basis, this dissertation puts forward the corresponding management suggestion. Companies can take measures to strengthen the exchange relationship between the leaders and members, and made it more harmonious. At last, it put forward the shortcomings of this dissertation and the future research prospects of related variables.The main innovation points of this dissertation are as follows:firstly, previous research about job embeddedness are mostly from individual, organizational, or the environmental factors, which lacks research from the perspective of relationship or interaction, this dissertation study from the perspective of the relationship between employees to study how LMX influence on-the-job embeddedness, which will be a useful supplement to the existing literature. Secondly, based on the previous literature, this dissertation finds that the organizational identity is closely related to the exchange relationship between the leaders and employees. So when discuss the relationship between the LMX relationship and on-the-job embeddedness, the dissertation add organizational identification into it to understand the internal factors of the impact of the exchange relationship between the leaders and members which has a strong sense of innovation.