Does abusive supervision play a role? The effects of community embeddedness on affective commitment and turnover intentions

Community embeddedness is an employee well-being strategy that diffuses turnover intentions. It focuses on contextual factors that encourage employees who live in the community to stay. However, our understanding is limited regarding how the community factors in the spillover process that facilitates employees’ commitment to organizations, leading to reduced turnover intention. This study examines the effect of contextual factors on shaping employees’ commitment levels by applying the conservation of resources theory, social exchange theory, and spillover theory, as well as the moderating role of abusive supervision. Data were collected from 341 full‒time frontline employees in hotel companies in Ghana, a sub-Saharan African country, using a multi-wave design with a time lag of two months. PROCESS MACRO 4 and hierarchical regression in SPSS were used to analyze the data. The results indicate that community embeddedness significantly influenced turnover intentions. Moreover, testing the predictive power of Fit, Links, and Sacrifice positively and significantly influenced affective commitment and turnover intention. Also, affective commitment exerted a partial mediating effect in the relationship between the dimensions of community embeddedness and turnover intention. Furthermore, abusive supervision was found to play a vital role by exerting moderating effects on the relationship between Fit and affective commitment, Links and affective commitment, and Sacrifice and affective commitment. Hence, this study provides empirical evidence of the spillover concept of community embeddedness and its dimensions in the community–organization domains in the hotel industry and suggestions for future research.