Psychological Safety, Job Crafting, and Employability: A Comparison Between Permanent and Temporary Workers.

Judith Plomp,Svetlana N Khapova,Maria Tims,Paul G W Jansen,Arnold B Bakker

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00974

Judith Plomp, Svetlana N Khapova + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00974

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Abstract

Employability is one of the leading challenges of the contemporary organizational environment. While much is known about the positive effects of job crafting on employees’ employability in general, little is known about its effects when employment contacts are different. Differentiating between temporary and permanent workers, in this article we investigate how in the environment of psychological safety, these two types of employees engage in job crafting, and how job crafting is related to their perceived employability. Data were collected among two samples, consisting of temporary agency workers (N = 527), and permanent employees (N = 796). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated a different pattern of results for the two groups: for permanent employees, increasing challenging job demands was positively, and decreasing hindering job demands was negatively related to perceived employability. Moreover, psychological safety was related to all job crafting dimensions. For agency workers, only increasing structural job resources was related to employability, while psychological safety was negatively associated with crafting hindrances. These findings suggest that a climate of psychological safety is particularly effective for permanent employees in fostering job crafting and employability.

Highlights

The past decade has witnessed many significant changes in contractual arrangements between employers and workers
Due to the current shift to organizations using more temporary work arrangements, we examined the indirect effect between psychological safety and perceived employability trough job crafting behaviors
Our study indicates that in particular for permanent employees, psychological safety is an important organizational factor associated with job crafting behaviors, as it was found to be positively related to increasing structural and social job resources, as well as increasing challenging job demands

Summary

Introduction

The past decade has witnessed many significant changes in contractual arrangements between employers and workers. Next to a broad pull of full-time workers employed on permanent contracts, there are increasingly more workers who work part-time and are employed on temporary contracts (Baruch and Altman, 2016; Katz and Krueger, 2016; Spreitzer et al, 2017). These latter workers can be associated with agencies that find assignments for them, or they can be contracted as freelancers (Cappelli and Keller, 2013).

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