A teams approach towards job insecurity, perceived organisational support and cooperative norms: a moderated-mediation study of individual wellbeing

Mental health is important to individuals, employers, and HR Professionals. The present study explores how teams can influence individual wellbeing. We use team-level job insecurity as an antecedent and team-level perceived organisational support (POS) climate as a mediator. In addition, we explore team-level cooperative team norms as a moderator within our study model. We expect teams that share job insecurities to have a lower POS, which ultimately predicts wellbeing, with cooperative team norms buffering these effects. Surveying employee teams within New Zealand, using a sample of 313 New Zealand employees (121 teams, with 2–4 people in each team), and multi-level modelling, we find support that job insecurity is positively related to anxiety and depression, as well as negatively related to POS climate. POS climate mediates the insecurity effects towards anxiety and depression, while cooperative team norms buffer the effects of high job insecurity towards anxiety but not depression. Moderated-mediation effects show the indirect effect of insecurity strengthens as norms do. The implications for organisations and HR are discussed.