An Empirical Study On The Non-linear Relationship Between Job Insecurity And Employee Voice

The relationship between organization and employee has changedbecause of the rapid development of business environment. Job is nolonger linked to permanent protection and security, which is thetraditional cognition in the old work contracts. Employee may not feelso safe as before and may insecure about their future. Along with thegrowth of this feeling, some mental health and work-related outcomesappeared gradually. Because employee voice is an act accompany withpossible risk and lost, though beneficial to the organization’simprovement, will inevitably affected by the employee’s job insecurity.And as an individual trait reflects one’s preference, the regulation focuswill affect and limit the relationship between job insecurity andemployee voice.In this study, we choose job insecurity as the dependent variableand regulatory focus as the moderator variable, the former of whichdescribe the external environment and the later describe the internalindividual difference. Through empirical data collected from286employee, we find a non-linear relationship between job insecurity andemployee voice, which moderated by the different level of regulationfocus. In low job insecurity area, employee voice behavior decreasewill increased job insecurity; while in high job insecurity area,employee voice behavior rises as the job insecurity increase.Specifically, the U shape relationship show more significant tendencyin the higher promotion focus group and more stable and smoothertendency during the higher prevention focus group. On the basis of above empirical results and existing literature, weexplored the intrinsic motivation and decision-making mechanisms ofemployee voice. We extended the motivation of employee voice fromorganizational benefits to tradeoffs between the employee’s personalincome and losses. The final performance choice will base the balanceand external environment, while the individual characteristics play asignificant role also. Staff will conduct an assessment of the potentialgains and losses and weighed to determine whether make voicebehavior or not. Because of different intrinsic voice concepts andpersonality characteristic, employee behavior will show correspondingstyles.