Why They Stay, Why They Leave: A Job Embeddedness Model of Turnover Intention in Student-Led Startups in Egypt

Purpose: Employee turnover is a persistent challenge for early-stage ventures, yet most research on this problem draws on samples from mature firms in developed economies. This paper addresses a narrower and largely unexamined context: student-led entrepreneurial teams operating within university-based startup ecosystems in Egypt. Drawing on job embeddedness theory, the paper develops a conceptual model explaining why members of such teams form the intention to stay or the intention to leave, and proposes founder-team relationship quality as a boundary condition on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach: The paper proposes a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design. A structured questionnaire adapting established scales for job embeddedness, turnover intention, and founder-team fit is designed for administration to members of student-led venture teams affiliated with Egyptian university entrepreneurship programmes and competitions. The paper specifies the sampling frame, measurement instruments, reliability procedures, and the planned analytical strategy (correlation and hierarchical regression analysis) in full, so that the design can be independently replicated and the resulting data subjected to peer scrutiny. Findings: This paper presents the conceptual model, hypotheses, and complete research design; empirical data collection is in progress at the time of submission. The results section is structured to report descriptive statistics, reliability coefficients, correlation matrices, and hierarchical regression output once fieldwork is complete, consistent with the reporting conventions of comparable published studies in this literature. Originality/value: Job embeddedness research has concentrated overwhelmingly on established organisations in North American, European, and East Asian settings. Very little work has examined how the theory applies to the informal, resource-constrained, and founder-centric environment of student entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa. By extending job embeddedness theory to this context and introducing founder-team fit as a moderating mechanism specific to early-stage ventures, the paper offers a theoretical and practical contribution relevant to entrepreneurship educators, student venture founders, and policymakers supporting university-based entrepreneurship ecosystems in emerging markets.