Abstract
The goal of the present research was to identify the mechanism through which job security exerts its different effects on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) among contract and permanent employees from social identity and social exchange perspectives. Our research suggests two distinct, yet related explanatory mechanisms: organizational identification and psychological contract breach, to extend the job security literature by examining whether psychological contract breach and organization identity complement each other and explaining the mechanism of different behaviors response to job security across employment status. Data were collected from 211 Chinese employees and 61 supervisory ratings of OCBs. Our results showed that relative to psychological contract breach, organizational identification plays a stronger mediating role in the association between job security and OCBs. Evidence from multi-group analyses also suggested employment status moderated the mediation mechanism of organizational identification between job security and OCB. Implications for job security and hybrid employment management are discussed.
Highlights
Low perception of job security reflects concerns about the continuity of future employment or the threat of losing a current job, which would bring various reaction into an employee’s work, life, and health (Sverke et al, 2002; Hans, 2005; Lam et al, 2015; Shoss, 2017)
Job security was positively correlated with organizational identification, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), and negatively related with psychological contract breach; the permanent employees (M = 3.78) tend to gain more job security than contract employees (M = 3.24)
Callea et al (2016) research focused on the mediating mechanism of organizational identification between job security and OCB
Summary
Low perception of job security reflects concerns about the continuity of future employment or the threat of losing a current job, which would bring various reaction into an employee’s work, life, and health (Sverke et al, 2002; Hans, 2005; Lam et al, 2015; Shoss, 2017). Studies have begun to focus on providing practical suggestions for curbing the negative results of low job security (Hans, 2005; Piccoli et al, 2017; Jiang et al, 2020; Kim et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020). This burgeoning research has demonstrated that employees’ undesired behaviors, such as low job performance or organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), may be a result of low job security (Hans, 2005; Haijiang et al, 2014; Ma et al, 2015; Stynen et al, 2013; Callea et al, 2016)
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