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The Qualitative Job Insecurity Scale (QUAL-JIS) has been used in job insecurity (JI) research for the past 9 years, without formal validation. The goal of the current study was to test the scale’s psychometric properties. We checked the scale’s reliability, as well as its validity, investigating evidence based on the scale’s content, internal structure, and relations to other variables (convergent and discriminant, predictive and concurrent, as well as incremental predictive evidence). We additionally evaluated its cross-country and longitudinal invariance over three measurement times (6 months apart) in two countries (Romania and Belgium; N _RO = 388, N _BE = 1,992). We found evidence for the scale’s reliability and validity, QUAL-JIS showing partial scalar invariance across time and between the two countries. Interestingly, qualitative JI measured with QUAL-JIS explained additional variance in the employees’ need for recovery above and beyond another popular qualitative JI scale.

 

Job insecurity (JI), a “sense of powerlessness to maintain desired continuity in a threatened job situation” (Greenhalgh & Rosenblatt, 1984, p. 438), is currently one of the most prevalent workplace stressors (Lee et al., 2018). Research consistently found JI to be harmful both for organizations and their employees (Shoss, 2017), with a recent meta-analysis (Sverke et al., 2019) concluding that JI is negatively associated with multiple types of impaired employee performance, and numerous studies providing evidence for the detrimental effect of JI on the employees’ well-being, including their mental and physical health (De Witte et al., 2016; Sverke et al., 2002).

JI was initially conceptualized with two main components: the concern about losing the current job, and the perceived threat of losing valued job...