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Almost every active participant of the labor market is exposed to job insecurity at some point of his or her professional life. Whether due to a career transition or to organizational restructuring, uncertainty about the occupational future is a common issue that has been shown to have adverse consequences (Cheng and Chan, 2008; De Witte et al., 2016; Sverke et al., 2002). While the topic of job insecurity is not new, its relevance has not faded. As social and economic changes continuing to grow (Price, 2015), work-related insecurity has become one of the key challenges of today’s world. Therefore, the recurring question is how it reflects in employees’ behavior and their well-being, and what can be done to manage this.
In psychological terms, job insecurity denotes a perceived threat to one’s employment situation (Sverke et al., 2006). The perceived threat of losing the job is coined as quantitative job insecurity, whereas the perceived threat of losing valuable job features, but not the job itself, refers to qualitative job insecurity (Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt, 1984; Hellgren et al., 1999). Until recently, studies on quantitative job insecurity have dominated the research agenda. In times of economic crisis and organizational downsizing, it might indeed seem more critical, leaving qualitative job insecurity unnoticed. However, the latter cannot be ignored as increasing evidence suggests it to be as much detrimental (De Witte et al., 2010). Specifically, qualitative job insecurity has been found to negatively affect employees’ attitudes (Vander Elst et al., 2014), work behaviors (Van den Broeck et al., 2014) and performance (Fischmann et al., 2015), thereby posing a threat to work-related well-being. This asks for a better understanding of how and under which conditions this form of job insecurity unfolds into detrimental outcomes.
This study adds to this understanding in several ways. First, it is grounded on the basic needs perspective in self-determination theory (SDT, Deci and Ryan, 2000). Defined as a classic workplace stressor (Sverke et al., 2002), job insecurity has been most extensively analyzed within stress theories, whereas findings based on alternative explanations are considerably less prolific and would merit from a constructive replication. In response to the call for this type of empirical evidence (e.g. Makel et al.