Staying or straying: The dual impact of tenure on employee turnover

Prior research treats tenure as unitary, obscuring how different dimensions shape worker mobility. We distinguish brewery tenure (time with an employer) from position tenure (time in a role) and examine how their associations with inter-brewery mobility vary by position rank and industry awards. Using 108,505 person-year observations from Japan's sake brewing industry (1955–2019), we model the cumulative number of breweries each brewer has worked for. Results show that greater brewery tenure is associated with lower career-level mobility, consistent with stronger organizational attachment and employer-specific capital accumulation. Conversely, greater position tenure is associated with higher career-level mobility, consistent with role-based plateau dynamics that encourage external moves. Higher position rank attenuates the positive association between position tenure and mobility, suggesting that advancement opportunities reduce plateau-driven mobility. Industry awards negatively moderate both tenure-mobility relationships, strengthening brewery tenure's anchoring effect while weakening position tenure's mobility-inducing effect. This suggests that recognition reinforces organizational attachment and partially buffers against role-based stagnation, though it does not fully eliminate plateau-driven mobility pressures. These findings suggest that organizations in skill-intensive, tradition-driven industries should sustain attachment and development for long-tenured employees while mitigating role-plateau risks through internal mobility mechanisms such as job rotation, enrichment, and transparent promotion pathways.