Does job insecurity threaten who you are? Introducing a social identity perspective to explain well‐being and performance consequences of job insecurity

• Author: Anne Mäkikangas,Christopher B. Stride,Eva Selenko
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2172

Does job insecurity threaten who you are?

Introducing a social identity perspective to explain

well-being and performance consequences of job

insecurity

EVA SELENKO

1

*, ANNE MÄKIKANGAS

2

AND CHRISTOPHER B. STRIDE

3

1

School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire,U.K.

2

Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

3

Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, U.K.

Summary This paper introduces a social identity perspective to job insecurity research. Worrying about becoming job-

less, we argue, is detrimental because it implies an anticipated membership of a negatively evaluated group—

the group of unemployed people. Job insecurity hence threatens a person’s social identity as an employed per-

son. This in turn will affect well-being and job performance. A three-wave survey study amongst 377 British

employees supports this perspective. Persons who felt higher levels of job insecurity were more likely to re-

port a weaker social identity as an employed person. This effect was found to be stable over time and also held

against a test of reverse causality. Furthermore, social identity as an employed person influenced well-being

and in-role job performance and mediated the effect of job insecurity on these two variables over time. Dif-

ferent to the expectations, social identity as an employed person and organisational proactivity were not con-

nected. The findings deliver interesting evidence for the role of social identity as an employed person in the

relationships between job insecurity and its consequences. Theoretically, this perspective illustrates the indi-

vidual and group-related nature of job insecurity and offers a novel way of connecting work situations with

individual well-being, behaviour and attitudes. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: job insecurity; social identity; well-being; job performance; organisational proactivity

‘How large, in your opinion, is the probability that you will become unemployed in the near future?’(De Witte,

1999, p. 164). Pondering an answer to a question like this is not particularly pleasant. Perceived job insecurity is

commonly defined as ‘…an overall concern about the future existence of the job’(Rosenblatt & Ruvio, 1996, p.

587) and presumed to be of growing concern to employees, given the stuttering economic recovery from the global

financial crisis (International Labour Organisation, 2015). In work psychological research, job insecurity is typically

regarded as a stressor, and it has been associated with a number of negative outcomes for individual well-being and

both job and organisational behaviour (e.g. see Cheng & Chan, 2008; Gilboa, Shirom, Fried, & Cooper, 2008;

Sverke, Hellgren, & Näswall, 2002, for meta-analytic findings). Consequences of job insecurity also span beyond

the work context. It has been related to household-saving behaviour (Benito, 2008), and even suggested as a trigger

for voting for extremist right-wing parties (e.g. Billiet & De Witte, 1995; De Weerdt, De Witte, Catellani, & Milesi,

2004). In the present paper, we introduce a new theoretical perspective to account for the varied negative conse-

quences of job insecurity. We argue that job insecurity, particularly the apprehension of becoming unemployed,

threatens a person’s social identity as an employed person. By threatening this valued part of a person’s social iden-

tity, job insecurity would have the power to negatively influence well-being, behaviour and attitudes associated with

that part of identity.

*Correspondence to: Eva Selenko, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU,

U.K. E-mail: e.selenko@lboro.ac.uk

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 10 July 2015

Revised 1 December 2016, Accepted 2 December 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 856–875 (2017)

Published online 22 January 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2172

Research Article

A variety of theoretical approaches have been previously proposed to explain job insecurity’s consequences. Job

insecurity has been associated with a breach of psychological contract (e.g. De Cuyper & De Witte, 2006), a threat to

valued resources (e.g. De Cuyper, Mäkikangas, Kinnunen, Mauno, & De Witte, 2012; Selenko & Batinic, 2013;

Vander Elst, Näswall, Bernhard-Oettel, De Witte, & Sverke, 2016; Vander Elst, Richter, Sverke, Näswall, De

Cuyper, & De Witte, 2014c), a dissatisfaction of fundamental human needs (e.g. Van den Broeck, Sulea, Vander

Elst, Fischmann, Illescu & De Witte, 2014) and a loss of control (Vander Elst, De Cuyper, Bailien, Niesen, & De

Witte, 2014a; Vander Elst, Van den Broeck, De Cuyper, & De Witte, 2014d) amongst many others. So far, none

of these approaches have included what we believe to be the core element of job insecurity, that is, the apprehension

of becoming unemployed, of no longer being ‘one of the employed’, which implies a threat posed to a person’s iden-

tity as an employed person.

This paper introduces a new theoretical perspective to the understanding of job insecurity: the social identity per-

spective (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Job insecurity, we argue, is stressful because it threatens ones status as an

employed person, which forms a substantial part of a person’s social identity. Social identity research has associated

the threat to a preferred social category membership (which could be ‘employment’) to a host of detrimental out-

comes (Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). These outcomes include,

amongst others, negative affect, reduced in-group loyalty, reduced commitment to group goals and lower perfor-

mance (e.g. Jetten, Branscombe, Spears, & McKimmie, 2003; Schmitt & Branscombe, 2001; Van Knippenberg,

2000). Furthermore, social identity research offers a wealth of knowledge on strategies to deal with threatened iden-

tity, such as denigrating ‘outgroups’, adjusting behaviour to group norms, leaving the ‘own group’and the specific

conditions under which these strategies take place (e.g. Ellemers, 1993). Therefore, the social identity approach to

job insecurity might be able to account for consequences of job insecurity that have been difficult to explain within

existing theoretical models—such as organisational outcomes (for a discussion, see, e.g. Probst, 2000; Selenko,

Mäkikangas, Mauno, & Kinnunen, 2013; Staufenbiel & König, 2010) and perhaps even outcomes that go beyond

the organisational context, such as voting preferences (De Weerdt et al., 2004) or the willingness to join a labour

union (e.g. De Witte, 2005; Sverke & Hellgren, 2001).

The research domain of this study is job insecurity, but the theoretical mechanism that is investigated can be ap-

plied to the explanation of other employment-related phenomena as well. In this study, we suggest that job insecurity

threatens a person’s social identity as an employed person; ‘being employed’is thereby understood as a social iden-

tity category in the sense of Tajfel and Turner (1986) and Turner et al. (1987). This theoretical idea might not only be

suitable for explaining the consequences of job insecurity, but also the consequences of other forms of employment

change, loss or threat could be explained by it. Social identity theory has been applied to the organisational context

before (e.g. Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Hogg & Terry, 2000), but an individuals’employment status itself and changes

in it have not been analysed from that perspective. The analysis of job insecurity from a social identity perspective

could hence serve as a first contribution to a new research strand. In Sutton and Staw’s (1995) sense, social identity

theory could become a strong new theory for understanding the consequences of job insecurity and other situations

where the employment situation is affected. This is important from an academic as well as practical point of view.

With strong theoretical guidance, protective factors from the detrimental effects of job insecurity might be more

readily identified.

Introducing a social identity perspective on employment and job insecurity

Employment and personal identity are very closely intertwined. When starting a conversation with a new acquain-

tance, one of the first questions people of a certain age get asked is ‘what do you do for a living?’In many social

situations, one’s own employment provides a handy way to define and position oneself in relation to others.

Providing identity and societal status is also recognised as one of the core latent functions of work and employment

(e.g. Jahoda, 1982, 1997). Accordingly, if employment is threatened, an important part of a person’s identity is being

SOCIAL IDENTITY PERSPECTIVE ON JOB INSECURITY 857

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 856–875 (2017)

DOI: 10.1002/job