Job Insecurity

The world is getting more and more uncertain. Organizations face challenging and dynamic environments and have responded by restructuring companies and laying off employees. For people, this has meant increasing amounts of insecurity around their jobs as they wonder whether and how long their jobs will last and/or whether those jobs will be changed so much as to be nearly unrecognizable. Job insecurity has been linked to stress and a variety of health complaints for individuals and negative impacts for the organization, including increased levels of turnover, and decreased levels of performance.

I've been involved in research on job insecurity since 1989 and believe that we have some pretty interesting findings about how people respond to it. For example, with heightened job insecurity you can expect heightened levels of deviant acts (negative acts towards the organization or individuals within it), because people go into a process of moral disengagement that allows them to justify those actions as somehow okay. Importantly, though, they don't morally disengage when they have positive relationships with their supervisors and coworkers. With positive connections they are unable to justify negative actions even though their insecurity creates a desire to do so.

Check out this study and also one showing that people experiencing job insecurity don't just take actions to cope with their own stress, but also take actions to improve their situations in the articles listed here.