Job Insecurity Revisited: Reformulating with Affect

Job insecurity augurs negative consequences for organizations such as reduced commitment and trust and intention to leave the organization. There is an ongoing debate whether to use multidimensional or global measures of job insecurity. This paper examines conceptual and operational considerations of job insecurity proposed by Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt (1984) that prompted the first multidimensional operationalization of their theory by Ashford, Lee, and Bobko (1989). The paper proposes a reformulated approach to measuring job insecurity that introduces affect as part of the measure thereby advocating multidimensional measurement of job insecurity while offering managers a more parsimonious basis for measuring this important organizational variable.