Unstable Jobs Cannot Cultivate Good Organizational Citizens: The Sequential Mediating Role of Organizational Trust and Identification

Although existing works have investigated the influence of employee’s job insecurity on his or her perceptions or attitudes, those studies relatively have paid less attention to the influence of it on employee’s behaviors, as well as to its intermediating mechanisms of the relationship between job insecurity and the behaviors. Considering that employee’s behaviors substantially influence various organizational outcomes, I believe that studies which examine the impact of job insecurity on the behaviors as well as its underlying processes are required. Grounded on the context–attitude–behavior framework, I delved into the intermediating mechanism between job insecurity and organizational citizenship behavior with a sequential mediation model. In specific, I hypothesized that employee’s organizational trust and organizational identification would sequentially mediate the job insecurity–organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) link. Utilizing 3-wave time-lagged data from 303 employees in South Korea, I found that organizational trust and organizational identification function as sequential mediators in the link. The finding suggests that organizational trust and organizational identification are underlying processes to elaborately explain the job insecurity–OCB link.