JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, VOL. 14,395-396 (1993)

Book Review

Job Insecurity: Coping with Jobs at Risk Jean Hartley, Dan Jacobson, Bert Klandermans and Tinka van Vuuren with Leonard Greenhalgh and Robert Sutton, Sage Publications, 1991.

According to the authors, the purpose of this book is to open up the area of job insecurity from the theoretical point of view, to summarize research conducted a t Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This book offers impli- cations for action. The authors note that this book is intended for ‘academic researchers, human-resource specialists, managers, trade union officials and consultants engaged in planning for the human and organizational consequences of uncertainty and job insecurity’. With the troubled economic times in many countries, this book is a timely contribution.

This book is organized into 10 chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the external and internal environmental factors as antecedents to job insecurity. The authors provide a detailed description of the job-security context and sample characteristics of three countries in which the surveys were conducted. Chapter 2 explains the differences between job insecurity and job loss experience. This chapter also describes the different approaches to the conceptualization and operationalization of job insecurity. Job insecurity is defined as ‘a concern about the future of one’s job’, and according to the authors, this definition served as a basis for the job insecurity measures used in the Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.K. studies.

A job insecurity model is proposed in Chapter 3 and it predicts that feelings of job insecurity are generated by factors that increase the perceived likelihood and the perceived severity of losing one’s job. This chapter draws the connection between feelings ofjob insecurity and individual’s coping strategies and psychological well-being. Finally, individual differences to job insecurity is explained in terms of the causal attributions people make and also in terms of the perceived costs and benefits of eachcoping strategy. While Chapter 4 presents the findings on the antecedents of job insecurity in the three countries, Chapter 5 reports on the consequences ofjob insecurity in terms of psychologi- cal well-being and the coping strategies individuals adopt.

Chapter 6 identified job insecurity as the unexplored intervening variable in explaining both the individual and industrial-relations attitudes and behavior. Chapter 7 examines the validity of the ideas presented in Chapter 6 in a case study of an organization experiencing a major rapid change due to recession.

Chapters 8 and 9 move to yet another level, that is, the organizational level of analysis. Chapter 8 examines the association of job insecurity on organizational effectiveness. Employing the approach developed in Chapter 8, Chapter 9 uses studies conducted in the United States to suggest strategies organizations can adopt to cope with or to prevent the negative effects of job insecurity on organizational effectiveness. Chapter 10 is the concluding chapter. It presents an overview of what the book has achieved emphasizing on the practical implications and what remains to be learned about job insecurity.

This book offers a unique contribution to both practitioners and academics interested in job insecurity. First, the authors collaborated their research efforts of their own respective countries: Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.K. to study the antecedents and consequences of job insecurity, and the impact of job insecurity on individuals and industrial relations. Implications on organizational effectiveness were drawn from

0 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

396 BOOK REVIEW

studies conducted in the United States. The collaboration between the authors contri- buted to the coherent presentation of this book’s content, a thorough understanding of the antecedents and consequences to job insecurity, and some tools to assess job insecurity. Another unique contribution of this book is from the context or organhtio- nal change prior to conducting the respective studies in Israel, the Netherlands and U.K. The Israel study was conducted less than a fortnight after the government announced a decision to dismiss 3 per cent of the entire workforce in the public sector. The Dutch study was conducted in three different organizations. One organization (an engineering company) was restructured or downsized due to a lack of demand for the company’s products. Similar situation was evident from the second (a shipyard) and third organizations (produced electrotechnical equipment). Lastly, the U.K. study is drawn from a manufacturing company which also experienced decline in both employ- ment and output.

The authors point out an important measurement difference which took place before their collaboration. Although all three studies employed three items to measure job insecurity, the Israeli measure focuses on the cognitive ‘likelihood of job loss’, the Dutch and U.K. measures encompass the affective ‘concern over job loss’ dimension. However, the authors defined job insecurity as ‘a concern about the future of one’s job’. The definition and operationalization ofjob insecurity may perhaps be more consis- tent had they all measured job insecurity reflecting the affective dimensions. Despite the difference in measurement content, when available, Chapters 4 and 5 show the correlations of antecedentdconsequences and concerns for job insecurity were quite consistent across the three countries.

The authors also point out in the concluding chapter that the studies reported have focused almost exclusively on male workers. They state that there were too few women in the three studies (i.e. Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.K.) to warrant separate or comparative analysis. This perhaps also reflects cultural differences with the United States that may be interesting for inclusion in future studies. Overall, this book is timely and is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in job insecurity.

CYNTHIA LEE Human Resources Group,

College of Business Administration, Northeastern University,

U. S. A.