Job Insecurity in the COVID-19 Pandemic on Counterproductive Work Behavior of Millennials: A Time-Lagged Mediated and Moderated Model

Fei Yiwen and Juhee Hahn
Additional contact information
Fei Yiwen: The Graduate School, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Korea
Juhee Hahn: Department of Business Management, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Korea

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 16, 1-17

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the market environment for the information technology (IT) industry changed dramatically, presenting companies with numerous obstacles in day-to-day management activities and changing business needs. Previous studies found that job insecurity due to COVID-19 significantly impacted millennials. Our research explored the effect of job insecurity on counterproductive work behavior among millennial employees during the COVID-19 period, using moral disengagement as a mediating variable, and psychological capital and negative emotions as moderating variables. In this study, 298 employees working in Chinese IT companies completed the questionnaire survey. We collected data from employees over three different time intervals (baseline, three weeks later, and six weeks later) to mitigate the issues of common method bias and single-source data. We analyzed the collected data using SPSS25.0 and Amos24.0 for structural modeling. Our research results indicate that job insecurity is positively associated with counterproductive work behavior, and moral disengagement plays a mediating role. In addition, psychological capital moderates the relationship between job insecurity, moral disengagement, and counterproductive work behavior. Negative emotions also moderate the mediating effect of moral disengagement between job insecurity and CWB.

Keywords: job insecurity; negative emotions; moral disengagement; counterproductive work behavior; psychological capital; millennials (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8354/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8354/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:16:p:8354-:d:609924

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().