The hypothesis that the existential domain is important, especially to those patients with a life-threatening illness, is supported because multiple regression showed that the existential subscale is at least as important as any other subscale in predicting a single item scale measuring the overall quality of life and plays a greater role in determining the quality of life of patients with local or metastatic disease than in patients with no evidence of disease.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesized mediation model that specifies psychological climate dimensions as antecedents of job insecurity, while accounting for occupational self-efficacy. Stemming from the conservation of resources theory, the authors hypothesize that job challenge, role harmony, leader support and co-worker cooperation negatively relate to job insecurity due to its positive correlation with occupational self-efficacy. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected with a sample of 329 white-collar employees from the ICT sector who were employed full-time and for a period of at least six months in their current organization. All hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling using the bootstrap method to test the significance of indirect effects. Findings Among the four work environment domains, only job challenge had a significant contribution in explaining job insecurity variance. This relationship was fully mediated by occupational self-efficacy. Research limitations/implications The cross-sectional research design limits the ability to make causality inferences, while the convenience sampling method limits the generalizability of findings. Practical implications The study results indicate that well-designed (i.e. challenging, autonomous and important) job tasks may be advantageous in organizational interventions aimed at reducing job insecurity due to their potential to strengthen employees’ efficacy beliefs. Originality/value The study results contribute to current knowledge regarding the relative importance of work environment antecedents of job insecurity, as well as the prominent role played by occupational self-efficacy in explaining some of these relationships.

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Against the backdrop of various and sometimes unexpected transformations of working conditions, qualitative job insecurity has become increasingly prevalent in academia and beyond. As a result, there is a great need for identifying factors that may mitigate its detrimental outcomes on employee well‐being. To do so, the current study aimed to investigate the role of two proactive participation strategies—participatory decision‐making and job crafting—as a means of counteracting the effects of qualitative job insecurity on burnout, work engagement and job satisfaction. The study was based on a sample of higher education employees in Belgium and Switzerland (N = 915). To test the hypotheses, moderation analyses were conducted in the overall sample and across different staff categories (i.e., senior and junior academic staff, administrative employees). Around 30% of the tested moderation effects were statistically significant, revealing that the negative outcomes of job insecurity were less salient at high values of the moderators. In particular, our findings suggest that encouraging participative decision‐making may serve as a means to maintain academic employees' job satisfaction and prevent burnout in turbulent times. Moreover, job crafting may be additionally targeted at preserving work engagement, even though its moderator effects were not universal.

By acknowledging the uncertainty and unpredictability of the job search process in an unemployment setting, the present study explored the predictive strength of dispositional employability in job search behaviours. Dispositional employability has been recognized as a potentially important personal resource that promotes job opportunities. However, it has rarely been assessed in an unemployment setting to date. According to recent employability models that differentiate between distal (i.e., personal strengths) and proximal (e.g., perceived employability) determinants of behaviour on the labour market, we hypothesized that: (i) dispositional employability relates positively to job search intensity and (ii) perception of one's employment possibilities (i.e., perceived employability) serves as an explanatory mechanism of this relationship. The hypothesized structural model was tested among a heterogeneous sample of 533 unemployed persons in Croatia. The results of structural equation modelling provided support for our hypotheses: dispositional employability related positively to job search intensity via perceived employability. Accordingly, nurturing dispositional employability may be beneficial for unemployed persons as it relates positively to engagement in job search behaviour.