Job insecurity and employees taking charge: The role of global job embeddedness

Although a few researchers have turned their attention to the positive impacts of job insecurity, they have discussed riskless pro-organizational behaviors, omitting some that are both risky and challenging, and neglecting different dimensions of job insecurity and the importance of comparative analysis of these. We examined the impact of dimensions of job insecurity on employees’ taking charge. Specifically, from the job preservation perspective, we explored the influence of job insecurity on employees’ response to taking charge. We acquired and analyzed leader–member matched data from 418 employees in 106 teams. We found a U-shaped relationship between employees’ quantitative job insecurity and taking charge, whereas there was a negative correlation between qualitative job insecurity and taking charge. Additionally, employees' global job embeddedness moderated the negative relationship between qualitative job insecurity and taking charge, such that high job embeddedness alleviated the negative relationship and low job embeddedness enhanced the negative relationship between the two. These findings contribute to the directing of employees' taking-charge behavior in organizations.