Exploring the performance implications of precarious work

Abstract

Precarious work, or employment that is associated with temporary contracts, low earnings and limited or no employee representation, is on the rise. From an operations perspective, these practices should enable flexibility and reduce costs. However, from the perspective of most other social sciences, precarious work harms workers and should harm firm performance. The objective of this research is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the performance implications of precarious work. We collected survey data in the UK from multiple respondents (operations and human resource managers) along with secondary data to explore how the use of precarious work affects a company's financial, operational and occupational health & safety performance. The results were mixed. Precarious work did not have a significant influence on occupational health & safety performance and had a negative relationship with cost performance. We also established an inverted u‐shaped relationship between precarious work and flexibility and financial performance; low levels of precarious work improve flexibility and financial performance and high levels of precarious work harm both. Finally, we explored if high‐performance work practices could moderate these relationships, but the results were mostly insignificant. The results suggest that firms only benefit from relatively low levels of adoption of precarious work.

The impact of leadership on perceived work-related stress in healthcare facilities organisations

“…The negative perception of stable workers towards management has been described in the literature (Wiengarten et al, 2021): safe workers may fear being treated equally in the future, or even losing their jobs, as their role could also turn into a precarious position. Sun et al (2021) shown as job insecurity has a moderating effect on emphasising the importance of work, on promoting participation in decision-making, on the expression of confidence in high performance, on autonomy and on the innovative behaviour of employees.…”

“…The negative perception of stable workers towards management has been described in the literature (Wiengarten et al. , 2021): safe workers may fear being treated equally in the future, or even losing their jobs, as their role could also turn into a precarious position.…”

“…, 2021). On the other hand, some other scholars failed to find any significant difference between staff working in general wards and frontline health workers (Wiengarten et al. , 2021; Etesam et al.…”

“…Some healthcare workers even experienced the fear of being physically assaulted by COVID-19 patients and their family members to apply some COVID-19 control measures (Alsuliman et al, 2021). On the other hand, some other scholars failed to find any significant difference between staff working in general wards and frontline health workers (Wiengarten et al, 2021;Etesam et al, 2021;Liu et al, 2020a, b;Buselli et al, 2020;Callahan et al, 2018;Kumar, 2016).…”

Freedom, work and organizations in the 21st century: Freedom for whom and for whose purpose?

“…Half of the jobs created between 2007 and 2013 in 26 European countries were precarious jobs (Wiengarten et al, 2021). The percentage of precarious workers in the USA rose from 10.7% in 2005 to 17.2% in 2015, and one in 10 workers in the UK was in precarious employment in 2019 (Wiengarten et al, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic only served to amplify these trends globally (Matilla-Santander et al, 2021).…”