Job embeddedness in hospitality and tourism scholarship: Past, present, and future research agenda

Highlights

• Job embeddedness (JE) includes work engagement, employee retention, and turnover intention.

• Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the knowledge domain enables understanding of JE.

• Bibliographic coupling analysis provides the most recent themes of job embeddedness research.

• Thematic content analysis presents the nomological network of JE.

• JE has been considered an individual construct from an employee perspective,

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of job embeddedness research in hospitality and tourism literature. Thus, it clarifies the fundamental research themes and phenomena, theoretical underpinning, and the most current research stream. Sixty-four documents on job embeddedness were obtained and tested by utilizing bibliometric analysis via VOSviewer and Biblioshiny in R software programming. Co-citation analysis demonstrated that job embeddedness is a research domain focusing on employee work engagement, retention, turnover intention, and the predictors of the phenomenon. Different theoretical bases can be adopted in different study areas, among which conservation of resources and social exchange have important roles. The bibliographic coupling and thematic evolutionary analysis of the documents clarify appealing trendy topics and provide several suggestions for further examination.

Introduction

The hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry is considered to possess a somewhat higher turnover rate than other industries (Tews et al., 2013). Towards building a more rigorous justification of the determinants affecting turnover intention, several scholars have focused on analysing the role of attitudes, including job satisfaction and organizational commitment which are frequently poor predictors of actual turnover (Holtom et al., 2006, Holtom and O’neill, 2004, Mitchell et al., 2001). However, in a more drastic repositioning of the study, other scholars claim that the knowledge gaps in the existing literature are related to too great a concentration on the motives why employees quit their work rather than the motives why employees stay (Frye et al., 2020, Robinson et al., 2014). Particularly, breaking with the conventional approach that considers job attitudes as the main predictors of turnover intention (e.g., Griffeth et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2012), Mitchell et al. (2001) originally conceptualized the job embeddedness (JE), to elucidate the role of on-the-job (e.g. individual adjustment with the work and company) and off-the-job (e.g. relations with the society via past experiences, relatives, acquaintances, and other social classes) determinants which could affect employee attitudes and behaviours with regard to turnover. Some investigators suggested that these determinants supersede job attitudes which would normally trigger intention to quit (Felps et al., 2009, Jiang et al., 2012).

Since its primary theorization, several scholars have investigated the role of JE as a predictor, an outcome, a mediating, and moderating variable (e.g., Arici et al., 2021b; Chan et al., 2019; Karatepe, 2013a; Karatepe and Ngeche, 2012; Karatepe and Shahriari, 2014). Scholars also found that JE supports positive work outcomes, such as employee commitment and service recovery performance in the hospitality industry (Karatepe, 2012, Karatepe, 2013a). However, most H&T research has been restricted to the empirical assessment of possible predictors (e.g., favoritism, servant leadership, supervisor support, job passion, job insecurity, work engagement, and leader-member exchange) and outputs (e.g., employee turnover, work engagement) of JE (Akgunduz et al., 2022; e.g., Ampofo and Karatepe, 2021; Arici et al., 2021b; Dogantekin et al., 2022; Teng et al., 2021; Zia et al., 2021a). In the H&T literature, JE has also been employed as a mediator to explain the relationships between antecedents and outcomes (e.g., Afsar et al., 2018; Chan et al., 2019; Chen and Ayoun, 2019; Karatepe and Ngeche, 2012; Khorakian et al., 2021; Zia et al., 2021a).

Because empirical research has not presented a full view of the development of JE literature, scientific knowledge of its intellectual structure – “an identification of the domain’s theme-focused characteristics from its roots to its roof” (Köseoglu, 2020, p. 2170) – remains in its infancy. Albeit significant contributions, the previous attempts have not presented the “big picture” JE research, and more decisive results on wider bibliometric analysis remain incomprehensible. The deficit in such bibliometric analysis also leads to a lack of completeness in evaluations of the intellectual connections in JE research. Our motivation is to fill the literature gap by clarifying influential documents and clusters, the thematic evolution of JE research, as well as descriptive inferences including publication growth and keywords occurrences.

The bibliometric analysis provides a systematic and unbiased procedure that is extensive, structured, transparent, simple to replicate (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017), and draws on empirical methods (Diodato and Gellatly, 2013). It is also applicable to network mapping and data analysis to examine the source knowledge of the domain (Palácios et al., 2021). Thus, our study relies on an integrative review to uncover the intellectual structure and the thematic progress of JE research in H&T literature. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical review of JE research that employs an integrative bibliometric analysis, offering a more comprehensive view of the knowledge domain within the H&T scholarship.

In this context, we focus on the occurrence of JE in the H&T field and fill the knowledge gap by bibliometrically analysing journal articles using VOSviewer and R with an inbuilt utility Biblioshiny. Using the bibliometric analysis, the researchers reveal an extensive comprehension of the source knowledge and recent trends in JE literature. The following objectives are proposed for outlining such relationships.

• To explore influential articles and themes of the knowledge domain,

• To seek intellectual structure in H&T sources by investigating the origins, development, and topics of JE research.

• To present emerging JE themes as a potential research platform for the future.

The present study adds to the H&T literature in a variety of ways. First, in addition to other relevant constructs, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Holtom and O’neill, 2004), JE is a significant factor influencing employee turnover in the H&T industry having a relatively higher rate than other industries (Blomme et al., 2010). Thus, JE concentrating on the determinants that stimulate employees to stay could be an efficient remedy for keeping talented employees in an organization (Arasli et al., 2017; Chen and Ayoun, 2019). Hence, revealing the origins, main themes, development, and evolution of JE research over an extended period is of crucial importance for both JE researchers and H&T organizations. The present work employs a novel bibliometric technique, including co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis. This is an additional approach that may be used to jointly reveal the most cited and citing documents within the knowledge domain. The researchers use these methods to present a full picture and highlight major prospects for JE research, guide theory progress and development, and create areas for further research. Second, our paper involves a greater number of H&T publications over a longer period than its predecessors. This technique is expected to provide H&T researchers with a complete understanding of the JE construct and its scholarly advancement. Finally, although numerous H&T research has employed citation and co-citation approaches (e.g., Köseoglu et al., 2021; Okumus et al., 2017; Shin and Perdue, 2019), the present study is one of the first to use bibliographic coupling analysis, to our best knowledge. This may help to reduce the constraints of citation and co-citation methods regarding realism, scalability, and generalizability because co-citation analysis’ results could change over an extended period, while the results of bibliographic coupling (i.e. the amount of references cited by two documents) remain to be fixed (Galvagno and Giaccone, 2019). More importantly, co-citation can be adopted for documents which have the threshold of the minimal citation, but bibliographic coupling can be used for current publications with few or no citations (Arici et al., 2022, Boyack and Klavans, 2010). Thus, our research has a great potential to reveal not only the intellectual structure but also trendy topics in JE research.

The following is how the paper is organized. The subsequent sections examine available studies as well as the intellectual underpinnings of JE research. Then, the methodology section is presented including the data collection strategy and justifying the analytical procedures. Following that, the bibliometric analysis of articles yields research results. Lastly, the paper concludes with a plan for further investigation and its possible restrictions.