Three-way interaction effect of job insecurity, job embeddedness and career stage on life satisfaction in a digital era

Abstract

Along with the severe global employment challenges caused by the rapid rise of digital technologies, the job insecurity (JI)–life satisfaction (LS) association has attracted increasing attention. However, there is still a dearth of studies investigating the crucial boundary conditions of JI–LS relationships in non-Western contexts. To fill this gap, we choose China, the world’s largest emerging economy, which is undergoing a radical digital transformation, as our research setting. Building on the conservation of resource (COR) theory, we focus on exploring two critical buffers of the JI–LS mechanism, of which job embeddedness (JE) characterizes a significant psychological resource and career stage embodies the time dynamics of this model. Data were collected from a sample of 317 Chinese media organization employees and were analyzed by the moderated hierarchical multiple regression approach. Our results show that JI is negatively related to LS and this relationship becomes stronger when employees have low JE (vs. high). Further, this two-way interaction is moderated by career stage; the impact of JI on LS is (1) stronger only for mid–late career stage employees who experienced low JE, and (2) weaker also only for mid–late career stage employees who experienced high JE. This study enriches the existing body of knowledge on the JI–LS model by highlighting the three-way interaction effect of JI, a critical psychological resource (i.e., JE), and time effect (i.e., career stage) on LS; it implies that older people with a certain amount of career experience and resource accumulation may perceive the effect of JI on LS differently than younger people.