How and When Leader Job Insecurity Influences Engineer In-Role and Extra-Role Behaviors

This article investigates how and when leader job insecurity influences engineer job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). By integrating social information processing perspective and dual-path model, this article hypothesizes that leader job insecurity influences engineer job performance and OCB negatively via engineer job frustration and occupational self-efficacy. Moreover, drawing from social support resource theory, we hypothesize that coworker support moderates the impacts of leader job insecurity on engineer job frustration and occupational self-efficacy. We test these hypotheses using data from a sample of 266 leader-engineer dyads. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we find that engineer job frustration and occupational self-efficacy mediates the negative and indirect effect of leader job insecurity on engineer job performance and OCB. In addition, coworker support moderates the relationship between leader job insecurity and mediators (i.e., job frustration and occupational self-efficacy) as well as the indirect impacts of leader job insecurity on engineer job performance and OCB.