DOES JOB INSECURITY LEAD TO NEGATIVE JOB ATTITUDES, OR VICEVERSA? A CROSS-LAGGED STUDY ON THE MEDIATING ROLE OF PERCEIVED STRESS

Due to increasing turbulences in the labour market, interest in job insecurity is growing as it is considered as a stressor associated with several individual- and organizational-level negative outcomes, however empirical evidence testing and contrasting alternative causation models is still lacking. Building on this consideration, this study aimed to examine the mediating role of perceived stress between quantitative job insecurity and job attitudes, i.e., organizational commitment, job satisfaction, work engagement, and turnover intentions, through a three-wave cross-lagged research design. In particular, we tested for alternative models of direct, reversed, and reciprocal causation. We sampled 347 Italian employees across three time points over a peri-od of eight months and we analyzed results by means of structural equation modeling. Structural models showed better goodness of fit indexes when reciprocal causation was taken into account, except for turnover intentions for whom reversed causation fitted better the data. We contributed to the literature by showing the different, alternative, role of quantitative job insecurity, as a predictor but also as an outcome of job atti-tudes and perceived stress. Practical and theoretical implications were also provided and discussed.