Hospital turnover has increased at alarming rates, particularly since the onset and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. While traditional theories of turnover look at why employees leave, job embeddedness is both a theory and a framework that examines why people stay. Authentic leadership is a relational leadership style comprised of components of self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, relational transparency, balanced processing, and caring. This quantitative correlational research investigated the relationship of authentic leadership as mediator between job embeddedness and turnover intent, as well as the relationships between the five constructs of authentic leadership, to determine which, if any, caused an increase in job embeddedness and a decrease in turnover intent. Participants were nursing professionals recruited through social media. Participants completed a 43-question survey on job embeddedness, turnover intention, and perceptions of authentic leadership. Multiple regression analysis supported authentic leadership as a mediator between job embeddedness and turnover intent. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that all five constructs of authentic leadership were correlated with job embeddedness and turnover intent, although only self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, relational transparency, and caring caused increases in the variance of responses. This study adds to the literature on antecedents to job embeddedness and on the specific authentic leadership behaviors that cause greater embeddedness and reduce turnover.