ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicTransforming Work Environments: The Impact of Healing Workplaces on Employee Wellbeing and Organizational PerformanceView all 10 articles
Beyond Job Satisfaction: A Job Embeddedness-Based Mediation Model to Explain Turnover Intention in Chinese Social Workers
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nankai University, School of Sociology, Tianjin, China
- 2HNU-ASU International College, Hainan University, Haikou, China
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Background: The Price-Mueller model and the Job Demands-Resources model examine how organisational working conditions influence turnover intention through the mediating mechanisms of subjective experiences, such as job satisfaction and burnout. Methods: To address the specific needs of indigenization and professionalization, We constructed a model incorporating "job embeddedness" based on existing models to better predict chinese social works' turnover intention. This study used Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model. Result: The model showed good fit indices. organisational working conditions significantly influenced turnover intention. The mediating effects of job embeddedness and job satisfaction were significant across most pathways. Job embeddedness demonsrated the strongest explanatory power for turnover intention within the mode. Conclusions: Strategies for reducing social workers' turnover intention should not only consider the job satisfaction pathway but, more importantly, prioritize the stronger mediating mechanism of job embeddedness linking organisational working conditions to turnover.
Keywords: Job Demands-Resources model, Job embeddedness, organisational workingconditions, Price-Mueller Model, social worker, turnover intention
Received: 13 Dec 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Luo and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaoge Zhao
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