Too Scared to Fight Back? Affective Job Insecurity as a Boundary Condition Between Workplace Incivility and Negative Mood States in Temporary Agency Workers

Abstract

Blue-collar temporary agency workers may confront daily workplace incivility, based on their status as outsiders in the user company, and affective job insecurity, based on their unstable employment situation. Building on the employment-health dilemma (Kößler, F. J., Wesche, J. S., & Hoppe, A. (2023). In a no-win situation: The employment–health dilemma. Applied Psychology, 72(1), 64–84) and the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion (Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press), we examine how these factors jointly shape workers’ daily affective experiences. We assume that workers with high levels of affective job insecurity feel less capable to fight back against workplace incivility. Consequently, we hypothesize that these workers are less likely to respond to daily workplace incivility with angry mood and more likely to respond with sad mood. To address our hypotheses, we conducted a daily diary study in Switzerland with 95 blue-collar temporary agency workers. As expected, affective job insecurity weakened the link between daily workplace incivility and angry mood, whereas it strengthened the link between daily workplace incivility and sad mood. In sum, our findings suggest that worries and fears related to keeping one’s job can alter how workers respond to daily workplace incivility. We discuss our findings in the context of temporary agency work.