Organizational and Job Resources on Employees’ Job Insecurity During the First Wave of COVID-19: The Mediating Effect of Work Engagement

Abstract

The world of work has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic due to the high instability observed in the labor market, bringing several new challenges for leaders and employees. The present study aims to analyze the role of organizational and job resources in predicting employees’ job insecurity during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, through the mediating role of work engagement. A sample of 207 Portuguese employees participated (Mean age = 45 years old, SD = 9.92), of which 64.7% were women. Data was collected using an online survey, including self-report measures of organizational resources (perceived organizational support), job resources (performance feedback and job autonomy), job insecurity, and work engagement. Data showed that job and organizational resources negatively influenced job insecurity. Moreover, work engagement was a significant mediator of the relation between performance feedback (facet of job resources) and job insecurity. Findings suggest that investing in job and organizational resources can act as protective factors to minimize feelings of job insecurity. Likewise, leaders should foster work engagement among employees to help them balance the relation between these resources and job insecurity, especially in crisis situations. Overall, this study takes a new, underexplored perspective, theoretically bridging organizational and job resources with job insecurity and work engagement during a time of great uncertainty, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Does small and medium enterprise differential leadership increase subordinate knowledge hiding? Evidences from job insecurity, territorial consciousness and leadership performance expectation

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Learning from mistakes climate scale: Development and validation

“…Hence, within the context of uncertainty, it is important for organizations to create a psychosocially safe space for employees to learn when mistakes happen. As organizations establish high psychosocial safety climate and learning climate, these serve as organizational resources that allow employee to be more engaged at work ( Vieira dos Santos et al, 2021 ).…”

Factors influencing work engagement among male nurses: A structural equation model

“…Researches showed that the work engagement was influenced by a lot of factors, mainly into two categories, namely internal factors and external factor (Mao et al, 2020 ). The internal factors contained regulatory emotional self‐efficacy (Lan et al, 2020 ), job satisfaction (Zhang et al, 2020 ) and performance feedback (Vieira Dos Santos et al, 2021 ), while the external factors contained job resources (Mukaihata et al, 2020 ), workplace bullying (Chan et al, 2020 ) and work overload (García‐Iglesias et al, 2021 ). However, there was a lack of research on the current situation of the work engagement of the Chinese male nurses and the research on the influencing factors of their work engagement.…”