Employee Reactions to Job Insecurity in a Declining Economy: A Longitudinal Study of the Mediating Role of Job Embeddedness

In the context of the Great Recession, we examined the relationships among perceptions of job insecurity, job embeddedness, and important individual work outcomes. Specifically, we tested the role of job embeddedness as a mediator between job insecurity and the withdrawal outcomes of intention to remain and job search behavior. Results of a longitudinal study of 115 working adults indicated that perceptions of job embeddedness fully mediated the relationship between perceptions of job insecurity and intention to remain and partially mediated job insecurity's relationship with job search behavior.