Reference no: EM132045914

Associations between Quantitative and Qualitative Job Insecurity and Well-being De Witte et al. (2010) investigated the association of employee’s perception of quantitative and qualitative job insecurity with job satisfaction, and psychological distress in the Belgium banking sector. Job insecurity is defined as the employees’ concerns about their work-related future. There are two kinds of job insecurities, the quantitative job insecurity and the qualitative job insecurity. The quantitative job insecurity is about the treat to the continuation of the job in the future. The qualitative job insecurity is about threat to the various valued aspects of the job, such as job content or working conditions. Data collection and respondents In total, there were 69,000 employees working in the 63 Belgian banks affiliated to the sector’s joint industrial committee in 2001. As questioning all employees would be too expensive, the researchers decided to survey a sample of 15,000 employees (roughly 21%). All the 63 banks participated in the survey. About 21% of employees in each bank were invited to participate in the survey. Within each bank, the respondents were selected at random with no particular quota for gender, age or employee level. The survey was based on addresses which had been provided by the banks (name, language, address) and each randomly selected employee received a personalized envelope through regular mail, sent to him/her by the employer. The completed questionnaire needed to be returned (free of charge) through the internal post within each bank. The researchers travelled to each bank to collect the completed survey. Measures Quantitative job insecurity was measured with four items developed by De Witte (2000) on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). Sample items were “I feel insecure about the future of my job”’ and “I am sure that I will be able to keep my job” (reverse coded). Reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) equalled .89. Qualitative job insecurity was measured with ten items from the 17 item measure that was originally proposed by Ashford, Lee, and Bobko (1989). These job features concerned four broad dimensions previously distinguished to describe the various characteristics of a job: job content (autonomy, skill utilization, and specific tasks), working conditions (workload and quality of working conditions), employment conditions (wage, working hours, and opportunities for promotion), and social relations at work (relations with colleagues and supervisors, respectively). Respondents had to indicate whether each of the job features would likely improve or deteriorate in the near future (1 = strongly deteriorate; 5 = strongly improve). We recoded the items so that a high score reflected qualitative job insecurity. Cronbach’s alpha equalled .87. Job satisfaction was measured with one item: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your current job?” (1 = very dissatisfied; 5 = very satisfied). Psychological distress was measured with the 12-item version of the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg, 1978). A sample item was “Have you recently lost much sleep over worry?” Responses varied from 1 (“less than usual”) to 4 (“much more than usual“). Reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) was .89. Control variables. The following social demographics and work-related factors were included: gender (0 = men; 1 = women), age (1 = 18–24; 2 = 25–34; 3 = 35–44; 4 = 45–54; 5 = 55+), education (0 = no education beyond high school; 1 = education beyond high school), extra income (0 = no partner with extra income; 1 = partner with extra income), children (0 = no children; 1 = children), occupational position (0 = white-collar worker; 1 = executive), working hours (0 = part-time; 1 = full-time). Q5: Research design What research design is used for current research? What are the positive and negative side of the current research design?