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The increasing pace of organizational change and demands for flexibility in work life, along with the increasing use of temporary employment are interpreted to reflect a more insecure work force (Heery and Salmon, 2000). Hence, job insecurity is a work stressor that many employees encounter during their careers (cf. De Witte, 2005). At the same time, job insecurity has been consistently associated with poor health and more negative work-related attitudes and behaviors (for meta-analytic reviews, see Cheng and Chan, 2008; Sverke et al., 2002). Whereas the vast majority of job insecurity research has focussed on job insecurity as an individual-level phenomenon, the construct has also been conceptualized as a job insecurity climate, defined as “[…] a set of shared perceptions of powerlessness to maintain the continuity of threatened jobs in an organization” (Sora et al., 2009, p. 130). In other words, job insecurity is more than a private, individual concern; it can be considered a facet of the social climate in an organization.
The concept of job insecurity climate has previously been studied in the form of aggregated perceptions of individual job insecurity (De Cuyper et al., 2009; Sora et al., 2009, 2013), i.e. the combined job insecurity perceptions of the individuals in a group. This operationalization is informative regarding the sources of variation in job insecurity perceptions, but it will only provide indirect estimates of employees’ perceptions of the job insecurity climate that surrounds these employees (cf. Baltes et al., 2009; Klein et al., 2001; Wallace et al., 2013). The present study therefore introduces a complementary approach where the direct measurement of individual job insecurity climate perceptions is proposed.
The overall aim of this study is to develop and psychometrically evaluate a measure of job insecurity climate. Specifically, the aim is to test and validate a new measure, which is designed to capture a broader social representation of job insecurity. This involves asking individuals’ to report on their perceptions of a job insecurity climate at the workplace. Importantly, a differentiation is made between the two different facets of job insecurity by using the labels job insecurity climate and individual job insecurity, respectively. The study has two specific aims: first, to test whether job insecurity climate and individual...