A New Perspective on Job Lock

Anna Huysse-Gaytandjieva (), Wim Groot and Milena Pavlova

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2013, vol. 112, issue 3, 587-610

Abstract: This paper analyses the situation when employees fail to adapt to overall job dissatisfaction. By combining the existing knowledge in economics on job lock and in psychology on employees’ feeling of being ‘stuck’ at work, the paper explains why some employees fail to adapt when dissatisfied with their job. Thus, the paper aims to expand our understanding of why some employees are job locked or are ‘stuck’ at their work even though dissatisfied. Using the British household panel survey, the possibility of falling in a job-lock state is analyzed to outline a set of factors that explain why employees differ in the way they adjust to job dissatisfaction. We divide these factors into socio-demographic features, personality attributes, type of occupation, employment conditions, type of sector, and work-related contextual features. Based on results of probit regression analysis, we provide evidence that all these group of factors can jointly predict the state of job dissatisfaction, the absence of job turnover and job lock (being ‘stuck’ at job). Moreover, our results suggest that the adaptation to job dissatisfaction could be better understood if personality attributes (such as self-esteem) are included in the analysis. Thus, this study expands our understanding of how and why employees might feel ‘stuck’ at work and fall in a state of job lock. Copyright The Author(s) 2013

Keywords: Job lock; Adaptation to job dissatisfaction; Job mobility; Self-esteem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-012-0072-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:112:y:2013:i:3:p:587-610

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-012-0072-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().