Job insecurity reflects a threat to the continuity and stability of employment as it is currently experienced. Job insecurity has been the focus of increasing scholarly and popular attention in light of technological, economic, and political changes over the past few decades that have left many insecure about the future of their jobs. Yet, conceptual ambiguities exist; the literature remains fragmented; and there lacks an overarching framework through which to organize and reconcile findings. The goal of this article is to offer an integrative review and conceptual framework that addresses these challenges and provides the groundwork for future research. To that end, it proposes a definition of job insecurity that differentiates it from potential antecedents, moderators, and outcomes. The article addresses antecedents and introduces a typology of mechanisms and threat foci that links antecedents to job insecurity and suggests yet unexplored predictors. Furthermore, the framework developed here considers four overarching mechanisms—stress, social exchange, job preservation motivation, and proactive coping—through which job insecurity leads to various outcomes, and it highlights potential competing tensions inherent in individuals’ responses. Finally, the framework introduces threat features, economic vulnerabilities, and psychological vulnerabilities as three overarching categories of variables that moderate reactions to job insecurity, and it identifies factors that contribute to each. In doing so, it suggests important levers through which to influence reactions to job insecurity; it helps explain variability in past research; and it provides a foundation for future work.

Why do employees who experience abusive supervision retaliate against the organization? We apply organizational support theory to propose that employees hold the organization partly responsible for abusive supervision. Depending on the extent to which employees identify the supervisor with the organization (i.e., supervisor's organizational embodiment), we expected abusive supervision to be associated with low perceived organizational support (POS) and consequently with retribution against the organization. Across 3 samples, we found that abusive supervision was associated with decreased POS as moderated by supervisor's organizational embodiment. In turn, reduced POS was related to heightened counterproductive work behavior directed against the organization and lowered in-role and extra-role performance. These findings suggest that employees partly attribute abusive supervision to negative valuation by the organization and, consequently, behave negatively toward and withhold positive contributions to it.

The goal of our study was to determine whether some forms of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) may serve to benefit employees. Building on the stressor-strain framework and theories of coping, we investigated whether two forms of CWB, production deviance and withdrawal, serve as a means of coping to mitigate the impact of low distributive and procedural justice on emotional exhaustion. Results from a survey of 295 employed persons from around the United States suggest that production deviance and withdrawal may benefit employees by reducing emotional exhaustion in the face of low distributive justice but not necessarily low procedural justice.

Drawing from an approach-avoidance perspective, we examine the relationships between subordinates' perceptions of abusive supervision, fear, defensive silence, and ultimately abusive supervision at a later time point. We also account for the effects of subordinates' assertiveness and individual perceptions of a climate of fear on these predicted mediated relationships. We test this moderated mediation model with data from three studies involving different sources collected across various measurement periods. Results corroborated our predictions by showing (a) a significant association between abusive supervision and subordinates' fear, (b) second-stage moderation effects of subordinates' assertiveness and their individual perceptions of a climate of fear in the abusive supervision-fear-defensive silence relationship (with lower assertiveness and higher levels of climate-of-fear perceptions exacerbating the detrimental effects of fear resulting from abusive supervision), and (c) first-stage moderation effects of subordinates' assertiveness and climate-of-fear perceptions in a model linking fear to defensive silence and abusive supervision at a later time. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record