All About the Money? Exploring Antecedents and Consequences for a Brief Measure of Perceived Financial Security

As often theorized in economics and organizational psychology, attaining and maintaining financial security is a universal, but often elusive, goal for workers. Yet, a thorough exploration of how financial security operates within the nomological network of occupational and relational phenomena has been lacking. This study enhances our understanding of financial security by exploring its dispositional and relational antecedents, work attitude and strain correlates, and relational consequences at home and work. Using a multidisciplinary, cross-context approach, this 3-study investigation provides construct validity evidence for a brief measure of financial security and assesses its psychometric properties for employed adults, dual-career couples, and salespeople. Results show acceptable internal consistency reliabilities for the measure of financial security (with Cronbach's alpha ranging from .88 to .94) and evidence of convergent and criterion-related validity. Specifically, we found that negative affectivity and number of dependents were inversely related to financial security, whereas family income and partner reports of financial security demonstrated convergent validity with financial security. We also find that financial security is positively related to job satisfaction in 2 of 3 studies, relationship satisfaction in dual-career couples, and client-reported relationship quality for salespeople, whereas financial security is negatively related to burnout. These findings suggest that financial security is a useful construct with multidisciplinary implications.