Abstract
Given the rapid changes in current technologies, business models, and work environments, organizations and managers increasingly rely on their employees’ proactive behaviors, such as taking charge, to gain competitive advantages. Taking charge involves a range of risky and future-oriented behaviors, and it requires employees to work hard to achieve them in the future. For employees with high job-insecurity, their job continuity in the future is threatened. Thus, they may not be willing to take risks to do additional work that is “future-oriented”. To our knowledge, the effect of job insecurity on employees’ taking charge has rarely been studied. As a result, the purpose of our study is to investigate whether, how, and when job insecurity will influence taking charge. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory and proactive motivation model, we develop a theoretical model. Moreover, we employed a multi-wave and multi-source survey to test our predictions. Based on the data from 194 full-time employees paired with their direct supervisors, the results provided consistent support for the proposed hypotheses. Specifically, the results indicate that job insecurity prohibits employees’ taking charge behaviors through deteriorating their work engagement. Furthermore, employees’ perception of interactional justice moderates the negative influence of job insecurity on their work engagement and, consequently, their taking charge behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Highlights
Received: 30 November 2021Rapid changes in current technologies, business models, and work environments have restricted managers’ capabilities to deal with complex and dynamic issues [1,2]
We propose that job insecurity can prevent employees from conducting taking charge behaviors for several reasons
The results showed that the negative mediating effect of job insecurity on employees’ taking charge through their work engagement is significant
Summary
Rapid changes in current technologies, business models, and work environments have restricted managers’ capabilities to deal with complex and dynamic issues [1,2]. To cope with these changes and maintain competitive advantages, increasing organizations are turning their attention to the employees because employees are the ones who are truly exposed to the “front line” and are most sensitive to changes when the company environment changes [3]. Organizations count on employees to proactively detect and solve problems to promote their effectiveness [1,2] Given this trend among the practitioners, researchers have paid growing attention to proactive behaviors [2,4]. Examples are actively modifying defective policies or improving production processes
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