Being proactive when feeling insecure? The role of proactive personality on the relationships between job insecurity and employee voice, feedback seeking, political behavior, and leadership skill development

Job insecurity (JI) has been an extremely relevant topic for academics and practitioners in the past two or three decades due to the fast changing economic situation and workplaces all over the world. Although there are many studies on the effect of JI on employee work attitudes and performances, existing research on how individual employees actively respond to JI is limited. In the proposed study, we aim to examine employees’ behavioral responses to JI and the boundary condition of such effects. We focus particularly on employees’ discretionary behaviors including feedback seeking, voice, political behaviors, and leadership skill development. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior and the research on proactivity, we suggest that JI has an inverted U- shaped curvilinear relationship with promotive voice, a negative relationship with prohibitive voice, a positive relationship with feedback seeking behaviors, a positive relationship with political behaviors, and a negative relationship with employees’ leadership skill development behaviors via individuals’ intention to do these behaviors. We further argue that these effects can be strengthened by individuals’ proactive personality. We conclude by describing a plan to test our model in Chinese organizations.