Retain or return: a job embeddedness perspective analysis of chinese rural migrant worker turnover
Creators: name: CAO, Yi
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350503
subject: Human resources management

description: The rural migrant worker population in China has attracted considerable attention because of its tremendous economic impact on society. With the shrinking local supply of blue-collar workers, many organisations in major cities rely more and more on migrant workers to perform basic jobs. However, the population growth rate of Chinese rural migrant workers has dropped significantly from 2017 to 2020. Consequently, retaining existing workers has become the most important task for organisations in major cities. While many studies abound in describing the demographic trends of Chinese rural migrant worker turnover, very few studies have attempted to understand it from a psychological perspective. To fill this research gap, this thesis brings together conservation of resources (COR) theory and job embeddedness theory to analyse why Chinese rural migrant workers quit their jobs in major cities and return to their hometowns.

Drawing on COR theory, this thesis develops a model in which job stress and social exclusion deplete the workers' psychological resources, the lack of which makes it difficult for them to continue in their present job. Meanwhile, building on job embeddedness theory, this thesis further tests the moderating roles of occupational embeddedness and community embeddedness which help the workers to deal with job stress and social exclusion separately.

To test the hypothesised model, a pre-test was first conducted to ensure that the measurements were properly constructed and translated. A pilot test followed, which determined the feasibility and identified the weaknesses of the hypothesised model. In the main test, data were collected from 733 rural migrant workers in the construction industry in Tianjin and Hebei provinces. A three-month time-lagged design was employed. 

The results of this thesis show that job stress and social exclusion lead the Chinese rural migrant workers to quit theirs job and return to their hometown via depleting their psychological resources, where the resource-depletion state is captured by emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the unfavourable impacts of job stress and social exclusion on the workers' emotional exhaustion were found to be buffered when the workers perceive a high level of occupational embeddedness and community embeddedness separately. 

Overall, this thesis provides new insights to the literature on Chinese rural migrant workers by understanding the impact of both social stressors and life stressors from a psychological resource perspective, which has rarely been considered in existing studies. Furthermore, this thesis explores how occupational embeddedness and community embeddedness can help workers to maintain a sufficient level of psychological resource in the face of job stress and social exclusion. In doing so, this thesis provides managers in labour-extensive organisations with effective takeaways for retaining Chinese rural migrant workers.