The Impact of Job Insecurity on Counterproductive Work Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Honesty–Humility Personality Trait

ABSTRACT

The detrimental effects of job insecurity on individual and organizational well-being are well documented in recent literature. Job insecurity as a stressor is generally associated with a higher presence of negative attitudes toward the organization. In this article, the moderating role of Honesty–Humility personality trait was investigated. It was assumed that Honesty–Humility would function as a psychological moderator of the job insecurity impact on counterproductive work behaviors. Participants were 203 workers who were administered a self–reported questionnaire. Results confirmed that job insecurity was positively related to counterproductive work behaviors whereas Honesty–Humility was negatively associated to them. More importantly, Honesty–Humility moderated this relationship, even after controlling for gender, age, type of contract, and the other HEXACO personality traits. For individuals with low Honesty–Humility, job insecurity was positively related to counterproductive work behaviors, whereas for individuals with high Honesty–Humility, job insecurity turned out to be unrelated to counterproductive work behaviors.

Keywords:

• job insecurity
• personality
• Honesty–Humility trait
• counterproductive work behaviors
• stress
• moderation regression analysis

Notes

¹The term CWB is often used as equivalent to deviant or antisocial behavior. CWB can refer to both property deviance (e.g. acquiring or damaging property belonging to the organization) and production deviance (e.g. violating organizational norms, quantity and quality of work). Deviant behavior refers to any behavior that brings harm, or has the intention to bring harm, to an organization or its members (Lau et al., 2003).

²The same moderated regression analysis conducted without socio–demographics and the other HEXACO traits yielded a significant interaction term of −.18 (p <.01). A Structural Equation Model was also run to test interaction effect between job insecurity and honesty–humility on CWB with latent variables. This analysis is interesting to have a true estimate of the magnitude of the interaction correcting for the unreliability of the measures. Overall, the model satisfactory fitted the data: the chi–square was not significant (chi² (14) = 17.73 p =.22) and also other fit indexes indicated good fit (RMSEA =.036, CFI =.99, NNFI =.96). Both Job insecurity and honesty–humility were significantly related to CPWB (.31 and −.21 respectively). More importantly, the interaction effect between job insecurity and honesty–humility on CWB was also significant and higher in the magnitude (−.26).