Addressing Work Stressors

Work illustrations by Storyset

Significant changes in the economic, political, and technological backdrops surrounding work have led to fundamental changes to the nature of work. Workers around the world are experiencing various work-related stressors. For example, with the impact of COVID-19 and the looming economic recession, employees may not be unsure how much longer they will be employed (i.e., job insecurity). Our research examines the negative impacts of job insecurity, searches for interventions to mitigate its adverse impacts, and identifies its triggers to truly mitigate job insecurity at its source.

Does a stick work? A meta-analytic examination of curvilinear relationships between job insecurity and employee workplace behaviors

Article Link | DOI:10.1002/job.2652

Authors: Jiang, L., Lawrence, A., & Xu, X.
Date of Publication: In Press.
Journal: Journal of Organizational Behaviour
Abstract: The job insecurity literature has been limited by the dominant linear view on the effects of job insecurity and the misconception that the conceptualizations and operationalizations of job insecurity across studies are homogenous. To challenge these two assumptions, we contrast the integrated perspective based on social exchange theory and job preservation motivation with activation theory and propose competing hypotheses for the curvilinear relationships between job insecurity and employee behavioral outcomes, including task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), creative performance, safety behavior, and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We also examine the moderating roles of different conceptualizations of job insecurity (i.e., cognitive vs. affective job insecurity; quantitative vs. qualitative job insecurity) in the proposed curvilinear relationships. Our meta-analysis demonstrates that the negative relationships of job insecurity with task performance and OCB-organization turn positive after inflection points, supporting the integrated perspective of social exchange theory and job preservation motivation but not activation theory. Moreover, the negative relationships of job insecurity with OCB-individual and creative performance turn nonsignificant as job insecurity further increases. Finally, job insecurity has a linear, negative relationship with safety behavior, but a linear, positive relationship with CWB-organization. Interestingly, affective job insecurity has lower inflection points than cognitive job insecurity, and qualitative job insecurity has lower inflection points than quantitative job insecurity. This study provides a deep and fine-grained understanding of the curvilinear relationships between job insecurity and workplace behaviors and pushes the literature forward by focusing on the nuanced differences among various types of job insecurity.

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

Article Link | DOI:10.1037/ocp0000267

Authors: Jiang, L., Xu, X., & Wang, H-J.
Year of Publication: 2021
Journal: Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Volume No.: 26
Page No.: 108-126
Abstract: 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.

Cognitive and affective job insecurity: A meta-analysis and a primary study.

Article Link | DOI:10.1177/0149206318773853

Authors: Jiang, L., & Lavaysse, L. M.
Year of Publication: 2018
Journal: Journal of Management
Volume No.: 44
Issue No.: 6
Page No.: 2307-2342
Abstract: Job insecurity is one of the most common stressors in contemporary working life. Although research indicates that the job insecurity construct has cognitive (i.e., the perceived negative change to one’s job) and affective (i.e., the emotional reactions to the potential change to one’s job) components, scholars rarely apply this distinction between cognitive and affective job insecurity in their conceptualization and theory development. On the basis of 535 independent samples, a meta-analysis in Study 1 found that (1) job insecurity was significantly related to 51 out of 56 outcomes and correlates; (2) affective job insecurity had stronger relations with the majority of outcomes and correlates than did cognitive job insecurity as well as explained valid, unique variance in outcomes and correlates above and beyond cognitive job insecurity; and (3) in most cases, affective job insecurity mediated the relationships between cognitive job insecurity and its outcomes. Furthermore, Study 2 examines a moderator that may explain why individuals with the same level of cognitive job insecurity may display different levels of affective job insecurity. Specifically, we found a stronger relationship between cognitive job insecurity and affective job insecurity among individuals with high work centrality with two samples. Overall, results demonstrate that it is empirically meaningful to treat cognitive job insecurity and affective job insecurity as two separate constructs and that affective job insecurity is more closely related to employee outcomes than is cognitive job insecurity. Future research could further assess affective job insecurity and continue to explore moderators and mediators in the cognitive job insecurity–affective job insecurity relationship. 

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer: Country-and state-level income inequality moderates the job insecurity-burnout relationship.

Article Link | DOI:10.1037/apl0000179

Authors: Jiang, L., & Probst, T. M.
Year of Publication: 2017
Journal: Journal of Applied Psychology
Volume No.: 102
Page No.: 672-681
Abstract: Despite the prevalence of income inequality in today’s society, research on the implications of income inequality for organizational research is scant. This study takes the first step to explore the contextual role of national- and state- level income inequality as a moderator in the relationship between individual-level job insecurity (JI) and burnout. Drawing from conservation of resource (COR) theory, we argue that income inequality at the country-level and state-level threatens one’s obtainment of object (i.e., material coping) and condition (i.e., nonmaterial coping) resources, thus serving as an environmental stressor exacerbating one’s burnout reactions to JI. The predicted cross-level interaction effect of income inequality was tested in 2 studies. Study 1 consisting of 23,778 individuals nested in 30 countries explored the moderating effect of country-level income inequality on the relationship between individual JI and exhaustion. Study 2 collected data from 402 employees residing in 48 states in the United States, and tested the moderating effect of state-level income inequality on the relationship between JI and burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion and cynicism). Results of both studies converge to support the exacerbating role of higher-level income inequality on the JI -burnout relationship. Our findings contribute to the literature on psychological health disparities by exploring the contextual role of income inequality as a predictor of differential reactions to JI.