Job Insecurity And Its Effect On Organizational Outcomes

With fast technological change and accelerated global competition, working life has been subject to dramatic change over the past two decades. These changes tend to produce increased feelings of insecurity among the workers, not only pertaining to their jobs but also about the future in gengral. A growing body of research suggests that job insecurity not only have negative consequences for employees' attitudes toward the organization, as one of a vital stressor, it also has detrimental effects on employee well-being and family harmony.The transformation of working life has brought the issue of insecure working conditions to the forefront, and a growing number of organizational behavior and occupational health scholars and practitioners are addressing the issue of job insecurity. However, fewer domestic studies have paid special attention to this field. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the construct and measurement of job insecurity, as well as its organizational outcomes and inner mechanism in Chinese culture. For these purposes, some standard research methods, such as literature review, interview and survey were used in the research. In addition, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical regression analysis were also applied for data analysis. 942 employees in 14 different kinds of companies which were from 4 cities in China were surveyed. The main conclusions are as the following:1. Construct and measurement of job insecurityThe construct of job insecurity consisted of five factors for Chinese employees. They were insecurity of job loss, insecurity of job execution, insecurity of payment and promotion, insecurity of excessive competition, insecurity of interpersonal relationship. The reliability and validity of job insecurity questionnaire were highly enough.2. Difference in demographical and organizational variablesEmployees with different sex, age, marital status, educational level, job tenure, job position, job category and from companies with different enterprise ownership and enterprise size had significant difference in the level of total job insecurity and its five dimensions.3. Psychological contract breach as a mediatorInsecurity of job loss had not throgh the mediator of psychological contract breach, but had direct positive effect on job engagement, organizational citizenship behavior to individuals (OCBI) and organizational citizenship behavior to the whole organization (OCBO).Insecurity of job execution had not throgh the mediator of psychological contract breach, but had direct negative effect on job engagement, OCBI, OCBO and intention to remain. Through the mediating effect of psychological contract breach, Insecurity of payment and promotion not only had negative effect on job engagement, OCBI, OCBO and intention to remain, and it also had direct positive effect on organizational outcomes.Through the mediating effect of psychological contract breach, Insecurity of excessive competition not only had positive effect on job engagement, OCBI, OCBO and intention to remain, and it also had direct negative effect on organizational outcomes (except intention to remain).Through the mediating effect of psychological contract breach, Insecurity of interpersonal relationship not only had negative effect on job engagement, OCBI, OCBO and intention to remain, and it also had direct positive effect on organizational outcomes (except intention to remain).4. Perceived organizational support as a moderatorBetween the positive relationship of insecurity of payment and promotion and OCBI, OCBO, perceived organizational support had negative moderating effect. Perceived organizational support also had negative moderating effect between the positive relationship of the insecurity of interpersonal relationship and OCBO. While perceived organizational support had positive moderating effect between the negative relationship of insecurity of excessive competition and OCBO.