In the current economic climate characterized by a lack of stability in employment conditions, the risk of exposure to job uncertainty has increased. As a result, job insecurity is a globally relevant phenomenon and is considered to be a prominent and common work stressor. It has probably become a structural feature of the labour market.
The individual perception and concern about the future permanence of the job is a challenge for today’s organizations not only because it is a widespread social phenomenon. Job insecurity leads to impaired health and well-being, as well as negative attitudes towards the organization and decreased performance.
In line with the topicality of the subject, the present project aimed to increase the understanding of the nature of job insecurity by examining its causes and consequences through a multilevel perspective, taking into account the view of the employee, the organization and characteristics of the country.
The European Union has already proposed an integrated strategy to enhance at the same time flexibility and security in the labour market, in order to adapt to the ever-changing economic environment. The aim is flexicurity, which means reconciling sustainable economic growth with more jobs and greater social inclusion (Horizon 2020). The emphasis is on the flexibility of labour markets and labour relations in order to support productivity and growth, as well as on employment and income security, which are necessary to ensure cohesion within society.
In order to monitor progress towards flexibility and job security, the European Commission has stimulated the development of statistical instruments to measure the achievements of Member States. Some of them give a comparative picture of a country’s policies and spending towards flexicurity, but they do not examine whether and to what degree they produce job security as an outcome experienced by individual workers.
Our proposal has just addressed these issues. By assuming a holistic approach, we have investigated job insecurity according to three levels of analyses: (a) as subjective perception at the individual level, (b) as shared perceptions at the organizational level, (c) as perceptions related to country characteristics (cross-country comparison).
In so doing, we also adopted a multidisciplinary perspective taking into account factors related to the economic conditions, social policies and labour market features, in addition to aspects concerning work psychology.
The goal was to achieve a comprehensive picture of the job insecurity phenomenon in order to better understand how to cope with it. In particular, a cross-country approach allowed us to shift the view from an exclusively individual-level investigation of job insecurity to an examination of interactions between individuals and contextual characteristics.
