Abstract
Despite substantial interest in job insecurity as a severe workplace stressor, the way in which its qualitative and quantitative dimensions co-occur is not fully understood. As a result, the variety of their combinations and potentially differential effects that they produce remain underexplored. The current study aimed to address this gap in two ways. First, we hypothesized that quantitative job insecurity would manifest in a cumulated form along with qualitative job insecurity but not vice versa. Second, we aimed to test whether different combinations of quantitative and qualitative job insecurity differentially reflect in employees’ occupational characteristics and health and well-being outcomes.Latent profile analyses were conducted on two different samples of employees (N = 1077 and N = 608). The findings from both samples supported a three-profile solution of qualitative and quantitative job insecurity resulting in the balanced low, balanced high, and qualitative job insecurity dominant profiles. As expected, the probability of temporary and part-time employment was the highest in the balanced high (i.e., cumulated) job insecurity profile. Moreover, both the balanced high and the qualitative job insecurity dominant profiles were linked to significantly lower mental health and well-being than the low job insecurity profile, suggesting that substantially detrimental effects may occur even if experiencing qualitative job insecurity only.
Highlights
Despite substantial interest in job insecurity as a severe workplace stressor, the way in which its qualitative and quantitative dimensions co-occur is not fully understood
Concerning organizational change experience, 52.0% (n = 560) had not experienced any change, 18.3% (n = 197) had experienced change related to their work, 15.0% (n = 161) had experienced change that was unrelated to their work, and 14.7% (n = 159) did not know the answer
Since our findings showed that qualitatively job insecurity dominant profile was related to the experience of organizational change, this indirectly suggests that, if not properly addressed, any type of anticipated involuntary work-related change may represent a risk of impaired health and well-being among employees
Summary
Despite substantial interest in job insecurity as a severe workplace stressor, the way in which its qualitative and quantitative dimensions co-occur is not fully understood. We aimed to test whether different combinations of quantitative and qualitative job insecurity differentially reflect in employees’ occupational characteristics and health and well-being outcomes. Their study has revealed the existence of five distinct combinations of job insecurity with differential effects on career outcomes, thereby showing the utility of a person-centered perspective in better understanding job insecurity as a stressor. This line of research certainly merits further elaboration because it can shed new light on the variety of job-insecure situations and their severity as well as their prevalence within the population. Linking them to employees’ characteristics that pertain to occupational instability and further inspecting the scope of their detrimental effects allows for a better detection of high-risk employee groups, which is relevant both in theory and in practice
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