Research On Perceived Job Insecurity And Its Relationship With Job Engagement

Perceived job insecurity becomes one of the most important variables fromboth the occupational health and the managerial practice perspective for theinfluence of organizational structural change, downsizing, emerging, jobcompetition and so on, all of which tend to produce increased feelings of insecurityamong theworkers over the past two decades in the globlizational process.Job engagement promises to yield a new perspective from the positive view oninterventions to alleviate burnout and make a valuable contribution to people'shealth and well-being.The research is designed with the purposes for examining the relationshipbetween perceived job insecurity and job engagement to solve the problem of howto promote job engagement when in fronted with perceived job insecurity inpractice exploring management strategies.Combining the interactive theory of stress, job demand-control-social support(JDC-S) model and social exchange theory, we try to discuss the mechanism ofperceived job insecurity and job resources on job engagement to solve the problemin practice exploring management strategies.In this paper, we first discuss the meaning of perceived job insecurity based onan interview study. Then we investigated a sample of 296 employees from differentkinds of enterprises in Nantong, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Zhongshanand so on to explore the relationship of job resources, including organizationaljustice and supervisor support, perceived job insecurity and job engagement. Themain results are summarized as the follows:(1) The structure of employee's job engagement in Chinese enterprises wascomposed of three factors. The three factors were Vigor, Dedication andAbsorption.(2) The structure of employee's perceived job insecurity in Chinese enterpriseswas composed of three factors. The three factors were perceived threat tovarious job features, perceived threat to total job loss and perceivedpowerlessness (3) The total score of perceived job insecurity and perceived threat are higher thanthe medium. But the perceived probilityof threat and perceived powerlessnessare lower than the medium in our survey.(3) Perceived job insecurity was negative linear relationship with job engagementin whole.(4) Controlling the type of organizations, we found the inverted-U relationalmodel of perceived threat with job engagement and its' components in privateenterprises.(5) Organizational justice, had reverse buffering effect on relationship of perceivedjob insecurity and job engagement: when in front of high organizational justice, perceived job insecurity was more negative with job engagement.(6) Supervisor support had reverse buffering effect on relationship of perceivedjob insecurity and job engagement: when in front of high supervisor support, perceived job insecurity was more negative with job engagement.(7) Job resources, including organizational justice and supervisor support affectedjob engagement in a significantly positive way.