Job Insecurity: Who is at Risk?

Abstract

Objectives: Job insecurity is a work stressor which has become increasingly relevant in the last decades due to major changes such as globalization and flexibility demands, which have been followed by organisational restructuring. This leaves a lot of employees worried about the future of their job. Research has contributed to a great body of knowledge around this work stressor regarding antecedents as well as consequences and moderators. Two recent meta-analyses have summarized the major consequences associated with job insecurity, such as decreased mental as well as physical health and impaired organisational attitudes such as job satisfaction, organisational commitment and trust. However, there is a need for a closer focus on identifying risk groups, that is, employees who are more vulnerable to experiencing job insecurity in order to apply knowledge in organisations and focus primarily on these employees to build up future preventions. The major aim of this study is to investigate how different groups of employees feel depending on their pattern of job insecurity over time. This is done by studying those who feels most threatened by job insecurity and who have responded the most negatively in terms of decreased work attitudes as well as decreased mental health. In addition we test who benefit the most from supervisor and co-worker support. Methods: A sample of 567 Swedish accountants has been examined longitudinally, where the majority of the sample had a university background and 60% was female. The hypothesis was tested whether there are differences in relations between groups of different job insecurity patterns and the known outcomes of job insecurity such as mental health, job satisfaction, commitment as well as work-family conflict. Results: Results show a difference between groups of insecure employees. Implications and conclusion: As this study tests a new approach on how to view job insecurity, with following change over time, it is first of all important to evaluate if previous results which did not differentiate between those groups hold also for in this study. Moreover, it has major implications for potential interventions to identify groups of employees that are suffering the most.