A resources-demands approach to sources of job insecurity: A multilevel meta-analytic investigation

• Published in: Journal of occupational health psychology Vol. 26; no. 2; p. 108
• Main Authors: Jiang, Lixin, Xu, Xiaohong, Wang, Hai-Jiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.04.2021
• ISSN: 1939-1307
• DOI: 10.1037/ocp0000267

Today's workers around the world are experiencing growing uncertainty about their future employment. Living in the chronic threat to the continuity of their employment (i.e., job insecurity) has adverse consequences. To understand where job insecurity comes from, we take a resources-demands perspective to synthesize and meta-analyze 57 theoretical sources of job insecurity. Using 3-decade (1986-2018) data from 425 independent samples representing 219,190 individuals from 39 countries, we find that the vast majority of theoretical predictors explain meaningful variance in job insecurity. Interestingly, resources (facilitating goal attainment), compared with demands (hindering goal attainment) have stronger relationships with job insecurity. Moreover, individualism, gross domestic product, and egalitarianism at the country level strengthen the negative relationships between resources and job insecurity and attenuate the positive relationships between demands and job insecurity, whereas power distance, national unemployment rate, and income inequality at the country-level lessen the negative relationships between resources and job insecurity and aggravate the positive relationships between demands and job insecurity. Finally, organizational practices account for significantly more variance in qualitative job insecurity than quantitative job insecurity, whereas personal factors and organizational social indicators explain a similar amount of variance in qualitative and quantitative job insecurity. Results suggest that gathering personal and organizational resources is more important than removing demands in terms of reducing job insecurity; having access to more resources in an attempt to diminish job insecurity is especially functional in countries high in individualism, gross domestic product, and egalitarianism, or low in power distance, national unemployment rate, and income inequality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).