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Introduction
As a result of the turbulent changes in organizational environment and the labor market, the notion of employability has received increasing research attention in recent years. According to Hall (2002), it can be viewed as a salient factor in understanding contemporary career success. In current literature, employability has often been conceptualized as a subjective measure (Vanhercke et al. , 2014), which concerns an individual's beliefs about how easy it is to find new employment (Rothwell and Arnold, 2007). De Cuyper et al. (2011a) suggested that perceived employability is conditional on time, context, and individual circumstances. As such, it is a dynamic and complicated concept. Given that perceived employability has some important implications for employee well-being and organizational success (De Cuyper et al. , 2011a, b, 2014; Kirves et al. , 2014), more research is needed to identify its antecedents, processes, consequences, and boundary conditions.
The purpose of this study is threefold. The primary objective is to propose and test a conceptual model that consists of both antecedents and outcomes of perceived employability. Specifically, we include work volition and self-efficacy as antecedents and work engagement and job satisfaction as employee outcomes. This model enables us to evaluate the mediating effect of perceived employability, and demonstrate how this construct links the individual-difference factors to some important work-related consequences. While previous research focused either on its antecedents or outcomes (e.g. Berntson et al. , 2006; De Cuyper et al. , 2014; Kirves et al. , 2014), the present study attempts to provide an integrated model to understand the dynamics of perceived employability in contemporary workplace.
Second, we also examine the moderating effect of job insecurity in the relationship between perceived employability and the two outcome variables (i.e. work engagement and job satisfaction). Defined as employee's perception about potential involuntary job loss (Sverke et al. , 2002), the construct of job insecurity has been noted to be closely related to perceived employability (Berntson et al. , 2006; De Cuyper et al. , 2014; Wittekind et al. , 2010). Our study not only disentangles the respective roles played by perceived employability and job insecurity, it also delineates a boundary condition of perceived employability on employee outcomes.
Third, most of the previous studies on employability were conducted in western countries...