Moving on Up Now? A Meta-Analysis of the Associations Between Job Insecurity and Career-Related Outcomes
verifiedrich profile · Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology · 2025
Låstad, Lena; Pienaar, Jacobus; Näswall, Katharina; Richter, Anne; Hellgren, Johnny; Sverke, Magnus
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
job insecurity → withdrawal
job insecurity → turnover intention
job insecurity → turnover intention
job insecurity → turnover intention
job insecurity → knowledge hiding
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
job insecurity correlates career satisfaction
job insecurity correlates knowledge hiding
job insecurity correlates turnover intention
job insecurity correlates withdrawal
job insecurity predicts turnover intention
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Job insecurity constitutes uncertainty about the future of the current job. Such uncertainty is expected to impact attitudes and behaviors about one’s work and career and how it will progress. The aim of the present study is to meta-analytically consolidate research on the associations between job insecurity and career-related outcomes. A further aim of the study is to explore two methodological moderators: study design (cross-sectional vs. longitudinal) and type of job insecurity measure (cognitive, affective, or combined). Based on a sample of 237 primary studies, our main results show that job insecurity was positively related to occupational and organizational turnover intention, job search behaviors, and knowledge hiding, and negatively related with career satisfaction, career opportunities, employability, and proactive skill development. In terms of the moderators, the associations were generally stronger in cross-sectional studies compared to longitudinal studies, while the impact of the type of job insecurity measure used was mixed. While our results inform research on job insecurity and career-related outcomes, more studies with a longitudinal design are needed on this research topic. Future research should also further examine how different types of job insecurity measures – cognitive, affective, or combined – are associated with career-related outcomes.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “This aligns with previous studies indicating that organizational members experiencing job insecurity tend to exhibit higher turnover intentions [45,46,81–83].”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.