Can Gossip Buffer the Effect of Job Insecurity on Workplace Friendships?
1
School of Psychology, University of Auckland, 23 Symonds Street, CBD, Auckland 1010, New Zealand
2
Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University; 250 Mills Godwin Life Sciences Bldg, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA
3
Business School, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16(7), 1285; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071285
Received: 14 March 2019
/
Revised: 30 March 2019
/
Accepted: 6 April 2019
/
Published: 10 April 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Job Insecurity on Non-Traditional Outcomes)
Although previous research has documented a host of negative consequences of job insecurity, workplace interpersonal relationships have rarely been considered. This omission might be caused by the application of broad stress theories to the job insecurity literature without taking a nuanced perspective to understand the nature of job insecurity. To address this issue, we conceptualized job insecurity as a threat to employee social acceptance by their employer. This conceptualization, therefore, allows us to apply the multimotive model of social rejection to investigate a previously-overlooked outcome of job insecurity—workplace friendships. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between both job feature insecurity and job loss insecurity with workplace friendships. Based on stress coping theory and the fundamental differences between job feature insecurity and job loss insecurity, we further proposed that employees’ tendency to engage in positive gossip buffers the negative impact of job feature insecurity on workplace friendships, whereas employees’ tendency to engage in negative gossip buffers the negative impact of job loss insecurity on workplace friendships. Data collected from 286 working adults from Mturk supported our hypotheses. Our study opens the door for future research to take a more nuanced approach when examining nontraditional consequences of job insecurity.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
job insecurity; workplace friendships; gossip; stress coping
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Jiang, L.; Xu, X.; Hu, X. Can Gossip Buffer the Effect of Job Insecurity on Workplace Friendships? Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 1285. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071285
AMA Style
Jiang L, Xu X, Hu X. Can Gossip Buffer the Effect of Job Insecurity on Workplace Friendships? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2019; 16(7):1285. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071285
Chicago/Turabian StyleJiang, Lixin, Xiaohong Xu, and Xiaowen Hu. 2019. "Can Gossip Buffer the Effect of Job Insecurity on Workplace Friendships?" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 7: 1285. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071285
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
