The Long Reach of Unemployment: Sensitizing or Inoculating Employee Reactions to Job Insecurity?

Adopting a life course perspective, we examined how prior experiences of unemployment might affect reactions to later experiences of job insecurity. In doing so, we applied a strong inference approach and pitted two theoretically derived predictions against each other, namely the stress sensitization and stress inoculation perspectives. According to the stress sensitization perspective, prior experience with unemployment would amplify negative reactions to job insecurity. In contrast, the stress inoculation perspective suggests that individuals with prior unemployment experiences might exhibit attenuated negative reactions to job insecurity. This is because such episodes are appraised as more normative throughout one’s career and are seen as an obstacle that can be successfully overcome. We tested our assumptions using four different archival datasets (total N = 1638) from the US and Germany, while considering self-evaluative, affective, attitudinal, performance, and health-related outcomes. Studies 1 to 3 found stronger support for the stress inoculation hypothesis, whereby individuals with prior unemployment experiences reacted less negatively to current job insecurity. In a comparison of explanatory mediating mechanisms in study 4, results indicated that the form of the interaction might depend on what is being triggered by perceived job insecurity (i.e., exacerbated feelings of frustration as reflecting the stress sensitization mechanism vs. attenuated relative deprivation as reflecting the stress inoculation mechanism). By adding a life course perspective to the study of job insecurity, our research broadens the investigation of boundary conditions. We discuss the role of country-level social security and time of data collection to explain the pattern of findings.