Time-Dependent Effects of Employee Job Embeddedness on Employee and Company Well-Being

In the present chapter, we explore how employee well-being changes over time, both linear and psychological during periods of economic instability. Moreover, we examine how employee job embeddedness (JE) buffers the effects of economic shocks on employee well-being, and how these buffering effects change employee perceptions of time. We theorize that employees with higher levels of JE psychologically experience economic shocks as occurring infrequently with the economically unstable period feeling quick, but employees with lower levels of JE psychologically experience economic shocks as occurring frequently with the economically unstable period feeling slow. Finally, we extend these relationships to account for the spread of employee well-being through social connections, both inside and outside of the work context. Because JE requires strong social connections, we theorize that the links component of embeddedness is responsible for economic shocks and employee well-being crossing over the work/nonwork boundary. We discuss the implications for our theoretical model.