Job Insecurity as Worker Control? Impacts on Commitment, Hostility and Work Effort Working Paper.

This paper asks how insecurity fares in comparison to other forms of control in generating effort among employees by investigating how craft control, direct supervision, automation, on-the-job training, participation and insecurity impact relationships with management, voluntary effort and effort restriction. We use content-coded data on 212 work groups to investigate how various approaches to control influence levels of voluntary effort and effort restriction, in part through their impacts on satisfaction, commitment and hostility. Findings from OLS and logistic regression demonstrate that investment in long-term relationships with workers produces more favorable outcomes for employers and employees, while insecurity generates reductions in commitment and increases in hostility comparable those associated with direct supervision. Insecurity has no discernible impact on voluntary effort. A negative impact on work avoidance is apparent, but only after controlling for levels of commitment and hostility - suggesting that unintended negative impacts on relational processes undermine potential benefits of insecurity for employers. In other words, insecurity is generally ineffective as a means of control due to countervailing impacts on workplace relations and, we argue, a decoupling of sustainable effort from keeping one's job. We conclude that investment in workers is a superior strategy for eliciting effort, although competition and short-term profit orientations may limit employers' capacity and/or inclination to pursue it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]