Working Hard or Hardly Working? An Examination of Job Preservation Responses to Job Insecurity

Abstract

The question of how job insecurity affects workplace behaviors has been the source of debate in the academic literature as well as in the popular press. The current study leverages and expands ideas from the Conservation of Resources theory about resource investment to examine how and when job insecurity is associated with behaviors indicative of promotive or protective job preservation strategies aimed at social or task targets. We present two studies. The first study takes a longitudinal approach to examine the bidirectional relationships between job insecurity and job performance, counterproductive work behaviors, knowledge hiding, and self-presentation ingratiatory behavior. The second study examines job preservation motivation as a mechanism linking job insecurity to these work behaviors, and it considers specific elements of threats as moderators (i.e., perceived threat controllability, perceived threat proximity). Together these studies suggest that job insecurity is associated with strategic behavior when employees are facing proximal threats to their jobs; however, these efforts are rarely in the best interest of organizations.