How job insecurity affects your personality?

We all have had phases in our career when we felt insecure about our jobs and we all somewhere remember how it made us feel. However, there is new study on people who undergo chronic job insecurity. People who experiencing chronic job insecurity can change your personality for the worse, say researchers, adding that those exposed to job insecurity over more than four years became less emotionally stable, less agreeable, and less conscientious.

According to the study researcher, Lena Wang from RMIT University in Australia, “Traditionally, we’ve thought about the short-term consequences of job insecurity – that it hurts your well-being, physical health, sense of self-esteem.” The study used nationally representative data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey in relation to answers about job security and personality for 1,046 employees over a nine-year period.

It applied a well-established personality framework known as the Big Five, which categorises human personality into five broad traits: emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and openness.
The study results showed that long-term job insecurity negatively affected the first three traits, which relate to a person’s tendency to reliably achieve goals, get along with others, and cope with stress.

The researchers said the results went against some assumptions about job insecurity. “Some might believe that insecure work increases productivity because workers will work harder to keep their jobs, but our research suggests this may not be the case if job insecurity persists,” Wang said. “We found that those chronically exposed to job insecurity are in fact more likely to withdraw their effort and shy away from building strong, positive working relationships, which can undermine their productivity in the long run,” Wang added.