How Job Changes Affect People's Lives — Evidence from Subjective Well‐Being Data

Abstract

Starting a new job is able to boost people's careers, but might come at the expense of other areas of life. To investigate individual implications of job mobility, we analyse the effects of job changes on time-use and indicators of subjective wellbeing using rich data from a representative German panel survey. We find that job switchers report relatively high levels of life satisfaction, at least for the first time after the job change. There is no such 'honeymoon' period for job changes triggered by plant closures. Instead, we find evidence for a harmful impact of involuntary mobility on family life.

Work changes and employee age, maladaptive coping expectations, and well-being: a Swedish cohort study

“…We examined employee well-being outcomes (job and life satisfaction, and sleep disturbances) after work changes and explored whether these outcomes depended on employee age and maladaptive coping expectations. In line with prior research (Chadi and Hetschko 2018 , 2021 ), we found that voluntary job changes were related to greater job satisfaction. Although voluntary job changes were also associated with life satisfaction when analyzed across employees, we could not confirm this relationship when analyzed at the within-person level.…”

“…When studying the consequences of job changes on employee well-being, it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary job changes (Garthe and Hasselhorn 2021 ). Voluntary job changes are associated with employees’ need for self-development, job improvement and career opportunities and, therefore, tend to lead to positive employee outcomes, such as higher job and life satisfaction (Chadi and Hetschko 2018 , 2021 ). Involuntary job changes are associated with organizational reorganization, downsizing, and layoffs, which may lead to lower employee well-being.…”

“…The sparse research that directly examined the outcomes of involuntary job changes could not establish negative effects on employee well-being (Chadi and Hetschko 2021 ; Equeter et al 2018 ; Garthe and Hasselhorn 2021 ). Instead, employees’ responses to involuntary job changes seem to depend on the extent to which they perceived the involuntary change as professionally and personally beneficial (Equeter et al 2018 ).…”

Temps dip deeper: Temporary employment and the midlife nadir in human well-being

“…A number of possible reasons were identified in the literature review (section 2) and, of these, the following remain to be investigated: a subjective feeling of not being good enough to get a permanent job; general insecurity; 18 These results are also unaffected by controlling for whether the individual has a new job, which is more likely to be the case for temps than permanent staff and has been demonstrated to provide a boost in job satisfaction (Chadi and Hetschko 2016). Analysis with this sample suggests that this boost is much more prevalent for job satisfaction than life satisfaction and should be explicitly controlled for in job satisfaction work investigating temporary employment, though see Chadi and Hetschko (2020) for recent evidence regarding the honeymoon effect of new jobs on life satisfaction.…”

What do unions do… for temps? Collective bargaining and the wage penalty

“…Second, while we justified our choice of job quality indicator, wages remain just one of many. We believe that psycho‐social markers of job control or subjective wellbeing are the next logical research frontier, as evidenced by a recent spate of empirical work in this space (e.g., Bessa et al, 2021; Chadi & Hetschko, 2021). Third, we intentionally chose to test our theory in a single country (arguably) falling under a well‐defined industrial relations “system.” An immediate next step would be to replicate this study on other national variants of the so‐called Anglo‐Saxon model.…”