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

Uncertainty tolerance moderates the link between job insecurity and service performance: evidence from China's hotel frontline employees

The pandemic crisis outbreak has impacted the hospitality industry tremendously. This study investigated the effect of job insecurity on service performance and examined the mediating role of cognitive appraisal and the moderating effect of uncertainty tolerance from the perspectives of cognitive appraisal theory of stress. The study collected a questionnaire from 316 hotel employees at three time points, with a one-month interval between the two time points. The SPSS PROCESS macro and MPLUS are used to test the research hypotheses. The results highlighted that the mediating role of challenge-hindrance appraisal, affirming that job insecurity positively impacts service performance via increasing challenge appraisal, and job insecurity negatively impacts service performance via increasing hindrance appraisal. Furthermore, the results show that uncertainty tolerance moderates the relationship between job insecurity and cognitive appraisal and also moderated the indirect effect of job insecurity on service performance through cognitive appraisal. The research results provide implications for human resource management in the hospitality industry.

The rise and fall of job insecurity during a pandemic: The role of habitual coping

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can trigger concerns about loss of employment and changes in work conditions, and thereby increase job insecurity. Yet, little is known about how perceived job insecurity subsequently unfolds over time and how individual differences in habitual coping moderate such a trajectory. Using longitudinal data from 899 US-based participants across 5 waves (March to June 2020), we investigated the trajectory of job insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this trajectory depended on habitual coping strategies such as planning, reappraisal, and distraction. Results from latent growth curve analysis indicated that, on average, job insecurity initially increased and then decreased after signing of the coronavirus stimulus bill, suggesting a pattern of shock followed by adjustment. During the shock phase, habitual use of distraction was related to less increases in job insecurity. Later during the adjustment phase, decreases in job insecurity were more pronounced for individuals with higher habitual use of planning, but were not affected by reappraisal or distraction. Hence, different coping strategies appear beneficial in different phases of adjustment, and the beneficial effect of planning may take time to manifest. Altogether, our study highlights how in the context of extraordinary and uncontrollable events, coping strategies can impact the trajectory of a stressor.

Taking stock and moving forward: A textual statistics approach to synthesizing four decades of job insecurity research

We collected the abstracts of manuscripts examining job insecurity published between 1984 and 2019 and carried out a textual analysis to investigate the defining clusters, their development over time, and whether there was evidence of siloed knowledge. Results suggested that job insecurity research seems to be fragmented into disciplinary foci (organizational psychology, public health, economics, and sociology). Further analyses on the organizational psychology corpus, revealed 25 topics with distinct temporal trajectories: some were increasing (analytical advances and differentiation between cognitive and affective job insecurity) while other were decreasing (scale development). The remaining abstracts revealed 15 topics with more stable trajectories. Based on these results, we identified five areas for future organizational research on job insecurity: the changing labor market, the need to better understand the experiences of marginalized workers and non-work outcomes of job insecurity, the added-value of qualitative research, and the need to critically evaluate our assumptions as researchers. Plain Language Summary Since the paper by Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt, research on job insecurity has burgeoned. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we collected the abstracts of all peer-reviewed manuscripts examining job insecurity published between 1984 and 2019 and carried out a textual analysis using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation and the Reinert method to investigate (a) the defining clusters of job insecurity research, (b) the development of such clusters over time, and (c) whether there was any evidence of siloed knowledge. Results suggested that indeed job insecurity research seems to be fragmented into four main disciplinary foci (organizational psychology, public health, economics, and sociology) with relatively little cross-fertilization. We conducted further analyses of the abstracts stemming from organizational research on job insecurity, revealing 25 topics with distinct temporal trajectories (e.g., “hot” topics including the increasing use of advanced analytic techniques and differentiation between cognitive and affective job insecurity) and “cold” topics including the development of job insecurity measures). The remaining abstracts revealed 15 topics with more stable research interests over time (e.g., a continued reliance on appraisal theories). Based on these results, we identified five areas for future organizational research on job insecurity based on: the changing labor market, the need to better understand the experiences of marginalized workers and non-work outcomes of job insecurity, the added-value of qualitative research, and finally the need to critically evaluate our assumptions as researchers.