New Insights for the Management of the Job Insecurity-Psychological Wellbeing Relationship

Empirical evidence considers job insecurity as a stressor that leads to poor job-related well-being. With the present study we intend to increase this knowledge by testing how and through what mechanisms job insecurity may give rise to such consequences. In particular, we examined the mediating processes underlying the relationship between job insecurity and emotional exhaustion, as an indicator of psychological well-being and core element of burnout. A total of 322 blue collar workers in Italy are used to test the hypotheses derived from our framework. The results found support for a model in which the effect of job insecurity on exhaustion was mediated by two variables, i.e. breached psychological contract and perceived distributive injustice (three-path mediational model). Employees who were insecure perceived a breach of their psychological contract, which led to distributive injustice perceptions, which in turn increased emotional exhaustion. The tested model provides a theoretical framework that may lead to new insights on the job insecurity-burnout relationship.