Job insecurity, which reflects employees’ concerns about losing one’s job, is generally characterised as a predominant work stressor. The research literature in this field has been steadily growing since the early 1980s and numerous studies have concluded that job insecurity may have detrimental consequences for both employees and organisations. Thus far, two meta-analyses have been published on the consequences of job insecurity for employee work attitudes, work-related behaviour, and health. However, these meta-analyses were published in 2002 and 2008 and contain only a few broad outcomes. Since then, the amount of published job insecurity studies have increased substantially, investigating a wider range of outcomes. There are still a number of important research gaps, including how job insecurity relates to a wide range of potential outcomes, and whether the associations differ between cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The aim of the present meta-analysis was to extend previous knowledge by (1) investigating the effects of job insecurity on a broader spectrum of outcomes than the previous meta-analyses have done, and (2) comparing cross-sectional and longitudinal associations.

A literature search with the search terms “job insecurity”, “job uncertainty”, “job security”, and “job security satisfaction” in Psycinfo, Web of Science, and EBSCO produced a sample of 553 samples from peer-reviewed papers published between 1980 and June 2017. The associations between job insecurity and various types of work-related and health-related outcomes were coded based on whether the associations reported were cross-sectional and longitudinal.

The results indicate that job insecurity has a substantial and negative influence on employees’ work-related attitudes, job performance, and mental and physical health, and may also result in impaired safety outcomes and negative spillover effects to life outside work. In general, the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations were of similar magnitude, thus indicating that the negative consequences remain also over time. While the study cannot address the question of direction of the relationships investigated (causality) and the analyses did not control for potential confounding variables, the results indicate that job insecurity may have strong, negative effects on a wide range of individual as well as organisational outcomes, both within and over time. The findings reported in the present meta-analysis both broaden and deepen the understanding of the negative consequences associated with job insecurity.