How to minimize job insecurity: The role of proactive and reactive coping over time

Abstract

Job insecurity is no longer a temporary setback but an experience that many workers endure for prolonged periods of time during their career. While there is much research on the behaviors that may help workers to cope with the negative consequences of job insecurity (i.e., reactive coping), insight into behaviors that may help workers to minimize or even prevent the experience of job insecurity itself is still minimal (i.e., proactive coping). Yet, such insight is crucial to advance our knowledge on the dynamics of job insecurity and may offer an alternative strategy to help workers manage the experience of job insecurity during their career. Hence, in this 5-wave weekly survey study among 266 workers, we view the experience of job insecurity as an ongoing process that may fluctuate over time and investigated whether proactive coping (career planning, scenario thinking, career consultation, networking, and reflecting) could help workers to minimize their future job insecurity. Multilevel path analyses showed that weekly proactive coping behaviors were either unrelated or positively (rather than negatively) related to job insecurity in the following week, indicating that positive outcomes of proactive coping may need more time to establish. Additionally, we explored whether coping behaviors that are proactive in theory could also function as reactive coping behaviors (i.e., could buffer the negative consequences of job insecurity). Results showed no buffering effects, indicating that theoretically proactive coping behaviors did not function reactively. We discuss that prolonged proactive coping efforts are needed in contemporary careers, despite the short-term discomfort.