Abstract
Nursing shortages is a global concern and South African nursing employers are also losing professional nurses to international job opportunities that provide lucrative compensation. Traditionally the migration of nurses is studied in the context of turnover and turnover intentions, while this study focussed on job embeddedness and investigates why nurses will stay. The aim of the study was to examine whether psychological contract breach predicts job embeddedness in a sample of 228 professional nurses from private hospitals in South Africa. An Explanatory Factor Analysis yielded a three factor solution for job embeddedness. Statistically significant negative correlations were found between psychological contract breach and community fit, organisation fit and organisation sacrifice. A Hierarchical Regression showed that controlling for age, citizenship and employment status (which explained 6% of variance in job embeddedness), breach (entered in Step 2) explained 28% of the variance in job embeddedness. This is a clear indication that nursing employers should keep their obligations and promises to retain their nurses. Future research may consider investigate the relationship between breach and job embeddedness in different countries as it is a global problem and includes organisational culture into the equation. The findings emphasised the importance of nursing stakeholders to embark on retention strategies for “on-and-off” aspects of job embeddedness.
M.Com.