Imagine that there is a general feeling of anticipating job loss at your work place or in your work group. Maybe something dramatic happened, for instance that the company you work for lost their biggest customer or client account. Or maybe there is just a sneaking suspicion in the work group that the company is not doing too well and that people might be let go. How would this affect you as a person, and how would it affect your work group?

With increased global competition in business and ever higher demands of flexibility, job insecurity is something that most employees will experience sooner or later. Anticipating job loss is an agonizing state of mind. In fact, experiencing insecurity related to the continuity of one’s job is regarded as more stressful than actually losing it. However, job insecurity perceptions do not arise out of nothing. They are of course embedded in a social context. Consider the ‘second great contraction’, the financial crisis that started in 2007 and the recession that followed it (e.g. Reihart & Rogoff, 2009): Watching the news and hearing about negative trends in employment rates, hearing about friends or family worrying about their future income, worrying about the future of your own job – it does something to you. Add to this picture that job insecurity can be shared within an organization, for instance amongst your coworkers. It thus becomes a shared perception, a climate of job insecurity. The aim of this article is to give a brief description of existing research on job insecurity, and to introduce the job insecurity climate construct to a broader audience.

Job insecurity as a work stressor

Leonard Greenhalgh and Zehava Rosenblatt defined job insecurity as “the perceived powerlessness to maintain desired continuity in a threatened job situation” (1984, p. 438). In addition to the worry of job loss, which is referred to as quantitative job insecurity, research has also considered the qualitative aspects of job insecurity, namely the anticipation of losing valued job features such as working conditions, promotional opportunities, and pay development (e.g., Hellgren, Sverke, & Isaksson, 1999).

An important point to be made here is that psychological research on job insecurity focuses on the subjective perception of insecurity, not the actual occurrence of an objective threat to the job or its content. For instance, downsizing can create perceptions of uncertainty in an organization even for those employees whose jobs are not being threatened (e.g., Spreitzer & Mishra, 2002). Research has shown that the anticipation of potential job loss or job insecurity is a work stressor which has short term negative effects on work attitudes like job satisfaction and turnover intention, and in the long term it may even affect well-being and health (Cheng & Chan, 2008; Sverke, Hellgren, & Näswall, 2002).

Social perceptions of job insecurity

Research on job insecurity has typically focused on insecurity perceptions at the individual level. However, by focusing solely on the individual level determinants, researchers have generally overlooked the role of the social context of job insecurity perceptions. Beatriz Sora, Amparo Caballer, José Maria Peiro and Hans De Witte were the first to introduce the job insecurity climate construct (2009). They defined it as “a set of shared perceptions of powerlessness to maintain the continuity of threatened jobs in an organization” (p. 130). There are several good arguments for why the social context has relevance for perceptions of job insecurity.

Generally, frameworks that take the social context into account allow for more complex descriptions of, for example, how stressors like job insecurity are perceived. Specifically, social cognitive theory explains how behavior, cognition or other personal factors and context interact in a reciprocal relationship (Bandura, 1986). That means that an employee’s perception regarding the continuity of the job is influenced by his or her personality, behavior and the social context, which includes the social climate at a work place. At the same time, this person is an agent in other employees’ social context, which again explains how shared perceptions or climate can emerge.

A second theoretical perspective that considers a role for the social context is the social information processing approach (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). This approach simply holds that social information, which may originate in the context or from past experiences, predicts how events are interpreted. Thus, how the organization has tackled similar situations in the past influences both individual job insecurity perceptions and the extent to which such perceptions are shared among an organization’s employees.

The degree of sharing is referred to as climate strength, and researchers often differentiate between strong and weak climates. If there is a strong climate in an organization, employees agree, or perceive the social climate in the same way. Conversely, with a weak climate, employees only agree to some extent. In some cases it is even fair to say that there is no social climate, if the perceptions are too divergent. Beatriz Sora and colleagues (2012) recently did a study on how climate strength affects the relationship between job insecurity climate perceptions and individual job attitudes like job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational trust. Their results show that when there is a strong job insecurity climate, the negative association between job insecurity climate and job attitudes is stronger than when the climate is weak. In other words, if perceptions of job insecurity are shared by most employees, the negative association between individuals’ perception of job insecurity and work-related attitudes will be stronger than if these perceptions are only shared by a few employees.

The greater context

Organizational changes and redundancies can affect perceptions of job insecurity within an organization. Comparing samples from Spanish and Belgian organizations, Beatriz Sora, Amparo Caballer, José Maria Peiró and Hans De Witte (2009) investigated the effects of job insecurity climates on the work-related attitudes of employees. They discovered that when people as a group feel insecure about their job, their sense of job satisfaction and individual commitment to the organization decreases – even when there is no objective threat to their job. In fact, norms, discussions in the media or simply hearing a subject being talked about by others can influence the individual’s understanding of this subject (cf. Göransson, 2009). This is also mirrored in the finding that the prevalence of job insecurity in the working population fluctuates in parallel with business cycles (Statistics Norway, 2007). When unemployment rates go up, so do the perceptions of job insecurity. Further, by analyzing data from 15 OECD countries, Anderson & Pontusson (2007) investigated whether and how cross-national differences in social protection, like for instance employment protection legislation, active labor market policies and unemployment insurance, affect the extent of job insecurity perceptions. The results showed that better social protection causes less employment insecurity. Also the extent to which an organization utilizes temporary employment contracts can increase climate-level job insecurity perceptions among the organization’s permanent workers (De Cuyper, Sora, De Witte, Caballer, & Peiró, 2009).

What can we do about it?

Given what is known about the negative consequences of job insecurity, we would expect there to be a wide variety of interventions countering it. Unfortunately, this is not the case (Canaff & Wright, 2004). There are some exceptions, though, for instance Susan Holm and Jane Hovland’s (1999) paper on counseling job insecure workers. They argue that at the individual level, counseling can be an effective way to help workers cope with the insecure employment. One may also argue that “survivors”, or the remaining personnel after downsizing incidents, should also be included.

Holm and Hovland also stress the information aspect of job insecurity. For instance, organizations can focus on openly addressing rumors related to downsizing. The findings of Tinne Vander Elst, Elfi Baillien, Nele De Cuyper and Hans De Witte (2010) support this view. In a study comprising 20 Belgian organizations, they discovered that organizational communication and participation is negatively related to job insecurity. In other words, having more organizational communication and possibilities of participation is associated with lower levels of job insecurity. In a similar vein, David Schweiger and Angeli DeNisi (1991) investigated the effects of a merger between two light manufacturing plants. They saw that communicating the organization’s intentions helped reduce employees’ uncertainty, and further, that positive perceptions about the organization increased. These included perceiving the organization as “trustworthy, honest, and caring”. And as a consequence of the positive perceptions of the organization, employee commitment to the organization was also maintained. In fact, these authors argue that it is not the informational content in itself that matters for commitment, but communicating care and concern for the employees. Similar results were also obtained in a Spanish study, where organizational support in general mitigated the association between job insecurity and employee reactions to insecurity, for instance job satisfaction and turnover intention (Sora, Caballer, & Peiró, 2011).

Conclusion

A social climate comes into existence when members of a group or organization share the same perceptions. It is therefore of utmost importance that an organization should prevent insecurity perceptions from becoming shared perceptions (e.g., Sora, Caballer, Peiró, & De Witte, 2009), as this will create a job insecurity climate. With the current review it can be concluded that developing better strategies for gathering and distributing information within an organization may prevent such an insecure climate.

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