This article reports the results of a 33-wave longitudinal study of relations between job insecurity and physical and mental health based on monthly data collected between April 2020 and December 2022 among = 1,666 employees in Germany. We integrate dynamic theorizing from the transactional stress model and domain-specific theorizing based on stressor creation and perception to frame hypotheses regarding dynamic and reciprocal relations between job insecurity and health over time. We find that lower physical health predicted subsequent increases in job insecurity and higher physical health predicted subsequent decreases in job insecurity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study advances research on the negative consequences of precarious work experiences (PWE), which include perceptions of threats to one's job and financial security as well as a sense of powerlessness and inability to exercise rights in the workplace. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, we examine how PWE relate to sickness presenteeism and worry about work-related COVID-19 exposure. In a 12-week, four-wave study of workers working fully in-person, perceptions of powerlessness and job insecurity were associated with presenteeism (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite decades of research, there is little empirical or theoretical consensus around how job insecurity shapes job performance. This article introduces an ecumenical, dynamic, and computational model of the job insecurity-job performance relationship. That is, rather than representing a single theoretical perspective on job insecurity effects, the model includes three key mechanisms through which job insecurity is theorized to impact performance-stress, social exchange, and job preservation motivation-and grounds these in a self-regulatory computational architecture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComplex disaster situations like the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) create macro-level contexts of severe uncertainty that disrupt industries across the globe in unprecedented ways. While occupational health research has made important advances in understanding the effects of occupational stressors on employee well-being, there is a need to better understand the employee well-being implications of severe uncertainty stemming from macro-level disruption. We draw from the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress (GUTS) to explain how a context of severe uncertainty can create signals of economic and health unsafety at the industry level, leading to emotional exhaustion through paths of economic and health anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough advanced technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence (AI), robots) are often discussed as drivers of societal inequality, our research examines whether people living in more unequal societies tend to view technology as a greater threat to jobs in general.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolitical scientists and sociologists have highlighted insecure work as a societal ill underlying individuals' lack of social solidarity (i.e., concern about the welfare of disadvantaged others) and political disruption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExtreme weather events, such as Hurricane María, shed light on the importance of understanding the factors that promote resilience, defined as bouncing back after adverse events. The current study took a qualitative focus group approach toward understanding resilience in employees of the hospitality industry after Hurricane María. The hospitality industry plays an important role in disaster responses due to its role in supporting local and national economies, job stability for vulnerable employees, and in supporting response efforts, eg, housing aid workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe world of work is changing dramatically due to continuous technological advancements and globalization (the so-called industry 4 [...
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContextual nuance holds value for occupational health and safety, particularly as workplace challenges and solutions become more complex. However, disciplines that inform occupational safety and health vary in the degree to which they target breadth and depth of understanding. The future of work presents challenges related to work, the workplace, and the workforce, and an appreciation of the context of industry will ready researchers and practitioners with the most informed solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
September 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic is a unique transboundary crisis which has disrupted people's way of life more dramatically than any event in generations. Given the ambiguity surrounding the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and its enduring negative effects, it is important to understand how this has affected important future of work trends. The aim of the current paper is to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on commonly discussed future of work trends relevant to occupational safety and health priority areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Occup Health Psychol
August 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to generate threats to occupational health, safety, and well-being. As a result, it presents an opportunity to deepen the field's insights into occupational health psychology (OHP), and to offer practical guidance that may help workers, organizations, and society mitigate the pandemic's negative effects. This special section of the (JOHP) addresses several implications of the pandemic for well-being and work behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this article, we draw on interdisciplinary research and theorizing to posit change in managerial active listening as a lever shaping change in affective job insecurity (AJI). Specifically, drawing on transactional theory, we argue that an increase (decrease) in active listening from one's manager should facilitate a dynamic coping process by strengthening (diminishing) perceived control. In turn, changes in perceived control should shape AJI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople are generally thought to worry about potential job loss to the extent to which they view job loss as likely to occur. However, might there be some individuals for whom job loss may be so detrimental that they experience high levels of worry even if they view job loss as less likely? To answer this question, the present study leveraged research on future-oriented cognition to investigate profiles of cognitive and affective job insecurity (JI). We examined how economic job dependency relates to different profiles of JI experiences as well as the implications of these profiles for understanding heterogeneity in work strain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
July 2021
The current paper expands an under-addressed concept within the job insecurity literature, namely, whether threats to job security are specific to the jobholder (person-at-risk threats) or specific to the job (job-at-risk threats). Using a between-person experimental vignette design, 136 employed participants were asked to imagine themselves in either a Person-at-Risk or a Job-at-Risk scenario. As expected, participants in a person-at-risk scenario indicated more negative reactions to job insecurity, as captured by greater anticipated negative affect and poorer perceived social exchanges and organization-based self-esteem.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccording to event system theory (EST; Morgeson et al., Academy of Management Review, 40, 2015, 515-537), the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and resultant stay-at-home orders are novel, critical, and disruptive events at the environmental level that substantially changed people's work, for example, where they work and how they interact with colleagues. Although many studies have examined events' impact on features or behaviors, few studies have examined how events impact aggregate emotions and how these effects may unfold over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on essential service workers has given rise to their newfound "hero" status, resulting in a dramatic shift of their occupational value. Service work has been long envisioned as "dirty work", and further, stigmatized by members of society (the Out-Group), until recently. This study utilized occupational stigma theory to identify the mechanisms under which both essential service workers and society at large came to unify around the importance of perceived dirty work in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent research on temporary work has suggested that temporary work experiences vary greatly in quality. In light of concerns about diminished quality of some temporary work experiences, we suggest that temporary workers may experience a variety of stressful work situations that could precipitate detrimental outcomes not only for these workers, but also for their co-workers and organizations. Using a multi-wave survey of temporary workers, this study examines the relationship between economic, interpersonal, and organizational stressors and counterproductive work behaviour (CWB).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Occup Health Psychol
December 2020
Many workers experience ebbs and flows of workload in concert with busy seasons, changing project demands, and changes to the way tasks are completed. The present study examined how anticipating workload changes influences emotional strain resulting from current workload. We extend conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) by hypothesizing that anticipated changes in workload may be viewed as a future opportunity to recover from current workload (in the case of anticipated workload decrease) or as a threat of loss of resources (in the case of anticipated workload increase), and that anticipated changes in workload would moderate the current workload-emotional strain relationship.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study explored distinct perceptual and decisional contributions to spam email mental construal. Participants classified spam emails according to pairings of three stimulus features - presence or absence of awkward prose, abnormal message structure, and implausible premise. We examined dimensional interactions within general recognition theory (GRT; a multidimensional extension of signal detection theory).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Occup Health Psychol
January 2018
Job insecurity is a ubiquitous threat that has been linked to a number of undesirable emotional, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. Against this backdrop, popular and academic accounts have hailed the ability to bounce back from threats (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Physicians' posts on social media have the potential to impact the patient-physician relationship, interpersonal relationships at work, institutions' reputations, and the public's trust in health care professionals. Empirical research, along with several very public cases of unprofessional behavior by physicians on social media, suggests that resident physicians are not always aware of the implications of their actions online. Residency programs are being charged with ways to model positive online presence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe challenge the intuitive belief that greater leader sensitivity is always associated with desirable outcomes for employees and organizations. Specifically, we argue that followers' idiosyncratic desires for, and perceptions of, leader sensitivity behaviors play a key role in how followers react to their leader's sensitivity. Moreover, these resulting affective experiences are likely to have important consequences for organizations, specifically as they relate to employee counterproductive work behavior (CWB).
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