Job insecurity is related to many detrimental outcomes, with reduced job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment being the 2 most prominent reactions. Yet, effect sizes vary greatly, suggesting the presence of moderator variables. On the basis of Lazarus's cognitive appraisal theory, we assumed that country-level enacted uncertainty avoidance and a country's social safety net would affect an individual's appraisal of job insecurity. More specifically, we hypothesized that these 2 country-level variables would buffer the negative relationships between job insecurity and the 2 aforementioned job attitudes. Combining 3 different data sources, we tested the hypotheses in a sample of 15,200 employees from 24 countries by applying multilevel modeling. The results confirmed the hypotheses that both enacted uncertainty avoidance and the social safety net act as cross-level buffer variables. Furthermore, our data revealed that the 2 cross-level interactions share variance in explaining the 2 job attitudes. Our study responds to calls to look at stress processes from a multilevel perspective and highlights the potential importance of governmental regulation when it comes to individual stress processes.

In this research, we simultaneously examined the relative applicability of person-environment fit and relative deprivation theories in explaining the interactive effects of perceived overqualification and collectivism cultural orientations on positive outcomes. We hypothesized that the negative (positive) influence of perceived overqualification on person-environment fit (relative deprivation) will be weaker among employees with high collectivism cultural orientation. We also examined which of these two different mechanisms would explain the hypothesized interactive effects in predicting these workers’ citizenship behavior, personal initiative, work engagement, and life satisfaction. We tested our hypotheses in two studies. In Study 1, we recruited professional staff (n = 852) and their coworkers (n = 301) from 95 universities and tested our hypotheses in a matched sample of 190 employees and their peers. The moderated mediation results supported the idea of person-environment fit (but not relative deprivation) as the mechanism explaining why collectivism orientations assuaged the negative effects of perceived overqualification on these outcomes. We constructively replicated these results in Study 2, which was a time-lagged design with full-time employees (n = 224). Study 2’s results further supported the robustness of our model by testing alternative moderators, mediators, and outcomes.

Employees’ performance has been shown to be moderately hampered by job insecurity. Based on conservation of resources theory, the study examines whether three possible resources (occupational self-efficacy, work locus of control and communication) moderate the negative job insecurity—performance relationship. Analyses of a large Swiss dataset reveal two significant interaction effects: the higher the job insecurity, the less influence work locus of control and perceived communication exert on the job insecurity—performance relationship. This suggests that work locus of control and perceived communication may be resources that can only act beneficially in a situation of low job insecurity.

This article examines variations of work-related flow both between and within days. On the basis of the effort-recovery model (Meijman & Mulder, 1998), we hypothesized that a person's relative day-specific state of being recovered (i.e., feeling refreshed) in the morning is positively related to subsequent day-level flow experiences during work. Taking into account research on circadian rhythms of human functioning, we further hypothesized that flow experiences follow a U-shaped pattern within the working day and that feeling recovered will affect this pattern. One hundred and twenty-one software professionals provided data on recovery at the start of the working day and on flow at 3 occasions during the day, for a period of 5 consecutive working days (resulting in 493 day-level and 1,340 occasion-level data points). Three-level multilevel models showed that relative day-level state of being recovered predicted day-level flow experiences in the hypothesized direction. The data did not support a general curvilinear, U-shaped main effect of flow experiences within the day. However, people in a relatively high state of being recovered in the morning experienced the predicted U-shaped pattern, whereas poorly recovered people experienced a gradual decrease in flow experiences over the course of the working day. This study emphasizes the importance of recovery during nonwork time for flow experiences within the entire working day, thereby extending research on task characteristics with personal resources when examining predictors of flow.