School of Psychology, University of Auckland, 23 Symonds Street, CBD, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University; 250 Mills Godwin Life Sciences Bldg, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Apr 10;16(7):1285. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16071285.
Although previous research has documented a host of negative consequences of job insecurity, workplace interpersonal relationships have rarely been considered. This omission might be caused by the application of broad stress theories to the job insecurity literature without taking a nuanced perspective to understand the nature of job insecurity. To address this issue, we conceptualized job insecurity as a threat to employee social acceptance by their employer. This conceptualization, therefore, allows us to apply the multimotive model of social rejection to investigate a previously-overlooked outcome of job insecurity-workplace friendships. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between both job feature insecurity and job loss insecurity with workplace friendships. Based on stress coping theory and the fundamental differences between job feature insecurity and job loss insecurity, we further proposed that employees' tendency to engage in positive gossip buffers the negative impact of job feature insecurity on workplace friendships, whereas employees' tendency to engage in negative gossip buffers the negative impact of job loss insecurity on workplace friendships. Data collected from 286 working adults from Mturk supported our hypotheses. Our study opens the door for future research to take a more nuanced approach when examining nontraditional consequences of job insecurity.
虽然先前的研究记录了工作不安全感带来的诸多负面影响，但很少有人考虑工作场所的人际关系。这种遗漏可能是由于广泛的压力理论在工作不安全感文献中的应用，而没有从细微的角度来理解工作不安全感的本质。为了解决这个问题，我们将工作不安全感概念化为员工在工作场所受到雇主社会认可的威胁。因此，这种概念化使我们能够应用社会排斥的多动机模型来研究工作不安全感的一个以前被忽视的结果——工作场所友谊。具体来说，我们调查了工作特征不安全感和失业不安全感与工作场所友谊之间的关系。基于应对压力理论以及工作特征不安全感和失业不安全感之间的根本区别，我们进一步提出，员工积极八卦的倾向缓冲了工作特征不安全感对工作场所友谊的负面影响，而员工消极八卦的倾向缓冲了失业不安全感对工作场所友谊的负面影响。从 Mturk 招募的 286 名在职成年人收集的数据支持了我们的假设。我们的研究为未来的研究开辟了道路，以便在考察工作不安全感的非传统后果时采取更细微的方法。
