Magnus Sverke

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• PhD
• Professor at Stockholm University

Job insecurity constitutes uncertainty about the future of the current job. Such uncertainty is expected to impact attitudes and behaviors about one’s work and career and how it will progress. The aim of the present study is to meta-analytically consolidate research on the associations between job insecurity and career-related outcomes. A further a...

There is often a gap between what managers perceive they do in terms of fairness (managers’ justice enactment perceptions) and how fairly employees feel treated by their supervisor (employees’ organizational justice perceptions). This study investigates three managerial actions as potential predictors of congruence in managers’ justice enactment an...

Many countries rely on short-time work to prevent mass layoffs in economic crises. Despite serving to protect jobs, short-time work may trigger job insecurity perceptions, which may impair employee well-being. Moreover, past experiences of unemployment may increase susceptibility to job insecurity in response to short-time work. Drawing on Conserva...

Meaningful work is related to the motivation to continue to work in older ages and later retirement. This qualitative study addresses calls for further research on the meaning of working for older workers using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach to explore in-depth the dimensions underlying the subjective experience of meaningful...

Significant shortages of nursing staff threaten the provision of sustainable and high-quality patient care, which may be partially addressed by encouraging experienced staff to postpone their complete exit from the workforce and extend their careers. This qualitative study explored the transition to retirement, the motivation to engage in post-reti...

Job insecurity, that is, the perceived threat of job loss or of valued job features, is a well-documented stressor with negative consequences for employees. This lead article proposes to advance the field by going both deeper and broader in linking individual job insecurity experiences to their social context on the microlevel (individual character...

We are grateful for the two commentaries on our lead article on job insecurity, its psychological repercussions and broader social context, which provide important additions, as well as impetus to refine and clarify our arguments. In this rejoinder, we respond to the most important points raised by the commentators: we refine our conceptualization...

This study explored pay-setting managers’ experiences regarding the individualized pay-setting process. Seven semi-structured group-interviews with pay-setting managers (N = 28) from four private companies in Sweden were conducted. A thematic analysis identified three main themes: 1) Prerequisites for pay-setting, which included conditions for pay-...

Past work has extensively documented that job insecurity predicts various work- and health-related outcomes. However, limited research has focused on the potential consequences of perceived job insecurity climate. Our objective was to investigate how the psychological climate about losing a job and valuable job features (quantitative and qualitativ...

How experiences and perceptions of pay and pay setting relate to employees’ job performance, willingness to remain in the organization, and health has been the subject of much debate. Previous research has typically used a variable-centered approach to investigate associations between different pay-related factors and such outcomes. In contrast, we...

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a broad theory of psychological growth and wellness that has revolutionized how we think about human motivation and the driving forces behind personality development. SDT focuses on people’s basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and how social environments that support these needs fos...

Military organizations often emphasize the importance of loyalty. It has been suggested that loyalty enhances motivation to take great risks and strive to accomplish a mission. However, research into what influences loyalty among military personnel is scarce. Hence, the aim of this study was to examine how leadership and social identity fusion rela...

Answering calls for an interactionist approach that would help clarify complex relationships among organizational socialization variables, this study applied a person-centered analytic approach aiming to examine the role of proximal socialization outcome profiles for distal outcomes. This approach is novel to organizational socialization research,...

In many countries, eldercare workers are approaching retirement. To remain attractive to older and experienced workers, organizations need to understand how employees nearing retirement think about and experience their work situation. This qualitative study investigated how older nursing assistants within residential care for older people experienc...

We examine how qualitative job insecurity, work motivation and perceived investment in employee development (PIED) are associated with employees’ contextual performance in terms of extra-role behaviours (ERBs). We propose a three-way interaction model and suggest that the way qualitative job insecurity relates to employees’ ERBs is contingent upon...

Social effectiveness, including political skill, reflects individuals’ ways of handling interpersonal processes at work. Most research has used a variable‐oriented approach to investigate associations between political skill and key organizational factors, including performance, in civil settings. Thus, little is known of whether political skill tr...

Non-standard employment includes a variety of contractual arrangements which deviate from permanent, open-ended, full-time work. There are several types of non-standard work, including project work, seasonal work, on-call work, solo self-employment, and temporary agency work. Non-standard workers are typically younger, have lower levels of educatio...

To address the challenges of demographic aging, governments and organizations encourage extended working lives. This study investigates how individual health- and age-related workplace factors contribute to preferred, expected and actual retirement timing, as well as to the congruency between preferences vs. expectations, and preferences vs. actual...

This study investigates whether job insecurity is related to employee learning (i.e. the acquisition of knowledge, skills and competencies/characteristics; KSAOs) and whether occupational self-efficacy functions as a mediating mechanism in this relationship. We used three-wave longitudinal data, with a time lag of six months, collected among Flemis...

In an unstable and unpredictable labor market, older workers are in a particularly disadvantaged situation. Indeed, from the moment an individual becomes unemployed, age is the most powerful individual attribute affecting how long it will take to find a new job, and for many older individuals, job loss in fact leads to their permanent exclusion fro...

Building on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework, we investigate managers’ ability, motivation, and opportunity as predictors of managers’ self-reported justice enactment during pay setting. Data from 168 managers from a large industrial company in Sweden were analyzed with hierarchical multiple regression analyses to predict the four dimen...

In an unstable and unpredictable labor market, older workers are in a particularly disadvantaged situation. Indeed, from the moment an individual becomes unemployed, age is the most powerful individual attribute affecting how long it will take to find a new job, and for many older individuals, job loss in fact leads to their permanent exclusion fro...

The use of performance-based pay is increasing rapidly, but empirical evidence on how and why it relates to job performance, as well as its relative strategical importance, remains unclear. The present study examined the relative importance of performance-based pay variables and support of psychological needs variables for task and contextual perfo...

Perceiving a pay system as just has been suggested to be a precondition for individualized pay to have a motivating effect for employees. Supervisors’ enacted justice is central for understanding the effects that pay setting can have on employee attitudes and behavior. Yet, enacted justice has received little research attention, in regard to both o...

Job insecurity, the subjectively perceived risk of involuntary job loss, has been widely researched as a stressor and linked to negative individual, organizational and extra-organizational outcomes. After providing a brief state-of-the-art review of research on the antecedents and consequences of job insecurity, as well as theoretical frameworks to...

Background: Overall, health-related correlates of job demands and job resources are well-known. However, in today's working life, personal resources are considered to be of increasing importance. Beyond general mental ability, knowledge regarding personal resources remains limited. This is particularly so among women working in the welfare sector,...

Denna studie undersöker vilka faktorer som bidrar till att yngre poliser i Sverige väljer att lämna yrket. Studien följer en kohort (N=717) av yngre poliser. Data från antagningen till polisutbildningen (T1-2008), efter ett års arbete (T2-2011) och efter sju års arbete (T3-2017) används för statistiska analyser baserade på en bred uppsättning varia...

Purpose: Individual differences in the development of perceived job insecurity among young workers may be influenced by characteristics of the first job (contract type and sector) and individual background (education and previous unemployment), and can have implications for subsequent health and well-being. The aim of this study was to investigate...

Previous research has shown that job insecurity is linked to a range of performance outcomes, but the number of studies exploring this relationship is still limited and the results are somewhat mixed. The first aim of this study was to meta-analytically investigate how job insecurity is related to task performance, contextual performance, counterpr...

Objectives This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the causal relationships between social support at work and mental health in terms of mental distress. Despite assuming social support at work to be associated with less mental distress, reversed and reciprocal relationships were investigated as well. Methods Self‐reports in questionnaires of...

Selection research has typically focused on how to identify suitable candidates, while less is known regarding the long-term effects of various selection factors once the suitable candidates have start- ed working.The overall aim of this study was to examine the relative importance of selection fac- tors (measured during recruitment), and psychosoc...

Purpose Social welfare work contains elements that may be difficult for employees to put out of their minds when the working day ends, which may affect the recovery. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the length of recovery in relation to different work characteristics and to two types of welfare work. Design/methodology/approach All 1,365 em...

While a considerable number of studies have focused on factors driving employees to voluntarily participate in training programs, much less is known on this topic with regard to the unemployed population, in particular the older unemployed, who often are in a vulnerable labor market position due to educational deficits and skills obsolescence. This...

Job insecurity is a predominant work stressor that has negative effects for individuals and organizations. The purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of the effect of organizational management, more specifically of production- and employee-oriented leadership, on job insecurity. Moreover, two potential mediators of leadership—goal cl...

Knowledge regarding the effects on employees of occupational intervention programs targeting psychosocial factors at work, including job demands, job resources, and personal resources, is limited and existing studies show mixed findings. This study aimed to investigate potential effects on employees’ job demands (i.e., workload, unnecessary tasks,...

Although downsizing and reorganisation are recognised as serious threats to the psychological well-being of employees, intervention strategies for addressing these events are limited. This study evaluated the effects of a participatory organisational-level intervention in which employees and managers chose to address the psychosocial consequences,...

Background: Psychosocial factors, including job demands and poor resources, have been linked to stress, health problems, and negative job attitudes. However, worksite based interventions and programs targeting psychosocial factors may change employees' perceptions of their work climate and work attitudes. Objective: This pilot study describes a...

Organizational changes are becoming a common response to financial and operational needs. The changes may be systematic and gradual or dramatic and sudden in an attempt to face various business demands. Different types of organizational changes are discussed in this chapter, focusing on the impact they may have on employees. One factor affecting em...

Anställningsotrygghet – en oro för att mot sin vilja förlora jobbet – är något som de flesta anställda idag upplever under sina yrkesliv. Den beteendevetenskapliga forskningen inom detta område har skjutit fart sedan millennieskiftet, vilket motiverar behovet av en uppdaterad litteraturöversikt. Översikten omfattar prediktorer och konsekvenser av a...

Den här kunskapssammanställningen utgår från ett uppdrag från Arbetsmiljöverket med syfte att utifrån befintlig forskning klargöra vilka samband som finns mellan organisatoriska och psykosociala faktorer i arbetet i förhållande till olika arbets- och hälsorelaterade utfall bland yrkesarbetande kvinnor och män. Ytterligare ett syfte består i att bes...

The aim of this study is to examine job insecurity from a multilevel perspective and to investigate the roles of two types of job insecurity – job insecurity climate and individual job insecurity – for work-related attitudes and health outcomes. It further explores the role of the workgroup – as a social context – in shaping job insecurity percepti...

Due to the segregated labor market, gender differences in health are often confounded by factors such as sector or occupation. This study explored similarities and differences in work climate and health complaints among women and men working in the same sector, in the same organization, and in the same occupation. First, work climate and health com...

Organizational downsizing may be a risk factor for morbidity both among displaced and those who remain in work. However, the knowledge is limited regarding its impact on clinically relevant mental health problems. Our objective was to investigate purchases of prescription antidepressants across five years in relation to workplace downsizing.We stud...

Previous research on occupational well-being has often taken the circumplex model of subjective well-being in general as point of departure and noted that well-being may be classified on the basis of the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal. In contrast to prior research, Anne Makikangas and her colleagues use a person-oriented approach in their...

Purpose – The cost of selecting and training new police officers is high. However, previous research has provided limited guidance on how to select the best applicants. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding of the possibilities to select suitable applicants by using combinations of four common categories of selection methods, na...

Job insecurity is considered a profound work stressor. While previous research has indicated that job insecurity represents a substantial mental health burden, few studies have examined its relationship with symptoms of major depression. The aim of this study was to assess whether episodic and repeated self-reported threats of dismissal increase th...

The current study contributes to the literature on job insecurity by highlighting threat to the benefits of work as an explanation of the effect of job insecurity on health complaints. Building on the latent deprivation model, we predicted that threats to both manifest (i.e., financial income) and latent benefits of work (i.e., collective purpose,...

Job insecurity and work-family conflict are increasingly prevalent in contemporary working life and numerous studies have documented their antecedents and negative consequences. The present study used longitudinal questionnaire data collected among teachers in Sweden to test the direction of the relation between job insecurity and work-family confl...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a measure of job insecurity climate by: first, testing whether job insecurity climate and individual job insecurity are two separate constructs; and second, investigating the relative importance of individual job insecurity and job insecurity climate in predicting work-related and healt...

There is limited knowledge about the prospective relationship between major work characteristics (psychosocial, physical, scheduling) and disturbed sleep. The current study sought to provide such knowledge. Prospective cohort, with measurements on two occasions (T1 and T2) separated by two years. Naturalistic study, Sweden. There were 4,827 partici...

Artikeln beskriver ett uppdragsperspektiv på arbete, det vill säga en fokusering på hur ett arbetsuppdrag formas och är sammansatt med avseende på resurser och krav med betydelse för att kunna genomföra uppdraget på ett bra sätt. I studien undersöks hur förutsättningarna för att utföra arbetet, i termer av arbetskrav och resurser i arbetet, hänger...

showed lower distress than those who were not. Additionally, features from both frameworks were found to be related to well-being. These findings highlight the merit of taking both theories into account to better understand the well-being of older individuals, and may be useful for the design of interventions aiming to enhance well-being and overco...

The present study investigates the relationship between felt job insecurity and union membership accounting for potential differences between temporary and permanent workers. Consistent with the idea that felt job insecurity leads workers to seek social protection from the unions, and with earlier studies, we hypothesize a positive relationship bet...

This study combines two recognized theoretical frameworks in the (un) employment literature - the latent deprivation model and the vitamin model - and aims to better understand the relations between the perceived quality of the psychosocial environment and psychological wellbeing in older adults. The sample comprised 300 Portuguese adults (aged bet...

Job insecurity has become more relevant during the last decades as more flexibility from the workforce and organizations is demanded in the labour market. It has frequently been suggested that job insecurity is a more severe stressor for those who are more dependent on their job. The present study investigates the association between job insecurity...

This study investigates the role of appraisals by employees of how work is affecting their health, or could end up affecting it in the future. The study tests a model of health appraisals as a mediator of the effect of demands and control on employee attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions). This was investiga...

Job insecurity is a work stressor that has detrimental effects on work related attitudes, well-being and health. Job insecurity has mainly been investigated as an individual level phenomenon. Consequentially, the focus of past research is only on personal determinants and consequences of the employee’s perception, and social/organizational factors...

Single scores from limited and unbalanced test batteries of cognitive ability can be ambiguous to interpret theoretically. In this study, a limited verbally and knowledge-loaded cognitive test battery, from applicants to the Swedish police academies (N = 1,344), was examined to provide foundations for the use and interpretation of test scores. Thre...

The present study investigates to what extent main and interactive effects of overall organizational justice and job characteristics shape employees’ work attitudes (organizational commitment, intention to stay) and health (mental health, somatic health) cross-sectionally and after a period of one year. Questionnaire data from 429 Swedish accountan...

Quantitative job insecurity, relating to threat of job loss, has received considerable research attention, but relatively little is known about qualitative job insecurity. The latter relates to uncertainty regarding valued job characteristics, such as career and wage progression. The aim of this study was to investigate whether situational appraisa...

This study sets out to investigate the impact of work-home interference on burnout in women and men, while taking genetic and family environmental factors into account. A total of 4446 Swedish twins were included in the study. The effects of work-home conflict (WHC) and home-work conflict (HWC) on burnout between and within pairs were analyzed with...

Research has consistently shown that employee health and well-being benefit from a balance between demands and resources at work but also from a balance between work-related efforts and rewards. Such balances are in turn associated with the balance between activation and opportunities for recovery, which are central for long-term health outcomes am...

Is there an intimate biographical relationship between entrepreneurship and antisocial tendencies? Drawing from Zhang and Arvey's retrospective study [Zhang, Z. & Arvey, R.D. (2009). Rule breaking in adolescence and entrepreneurial status: An empirical investigation. Journal of Business Venturing, 24(5), 436–447], which found a link between entrepr...

Purpose – The purpose of the present paper is to investigate how employees' coping (problem, emotion and avoidance focused coping) may affect the reactions to job insecurity. Because the coping investigated in the present study addresses the stressor in different ways, the authors expect different moderating effects depending on the type of coping,...

Over the last few decades, increased flexibility and lack of stability in employment has made job insecurity a work stressor that affects more and more employees. Since worrying about potential job loss (quantitative job insecurity) or possible loss of valued job features (qualitative job insecurity) constitutes a subjective perception, it has been...

Job insecurity as a work-related stressor is well established through three decades of research. It has been related to outcomes such as decreased job satisfaction, organisational commitment and performance as well as increased ill-health and organisational turnover. However, some important conceptual and theoretical issues are still under discussi...

Modern working life involves higher demands on individual responsibility, blurrier lines between work and private life, increasing flexibility as regards the scheduling of work hours including a high variability from week-to-week or day-to-day, temporary employment contracts and job insecurity, and unstable organizational conditions. This developme...

Psykosociala arbetsmiljöfaktorers inverkan på hälsa och produktivitet kan sammanfattas i ett antal balanser; balanserna krav–kontroll, ansträngning–belöning, arbete–återhämtning, mål– resurser och kvantitet– kvalitet. Trots befintlig kunskap saknas interventionsstudier som fokuserat på dessa balanser. Här redovisas resultat från ett pilotprojekt dä...

Job insecurity has been linked to different negative outcomes, such as negative work attitudes and health problems, with most studies including self-reported outcomes. Extending earlier research, the present study includes both self-reported and physiological indicators of health and sets out to investigate whether higher levels of job insecurity a...

Sjöberg, S., Sjöberg, A., Näswall, K. & Sverke, M. (2012). Using individual differences to predict job performance: Correcting for direct and indirect restriction of range. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 368–373. The present study investigates the relationship between individual differences, indicated by personality (FFM) and general mental...

Background Job insecurity is a modern work stressor negatively affecting work attitudes, wellbeing and the health of employees worldwide. It has mainly been investigated as a individual level phenomenon, but by looking to the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory, it could be argued that job insecurity is also a social phenomenon: Behavi...

Unlabelled: Psychosocial work characteristics including high demands, lack of control and poor social support have consistently been linked to poor health as has poor general mental ability (GMA). However, less is known about the relationships between stable individual factors such as GMA, psychosocial work characteristics and health. Objective:...

Organizational restructuring often implies significant changes to the work organization, and a redistribution of tasks and demands assigned to different organizational positions. Effects for the individual may be manifold; some may become unemployed having to search new employment elsewhere, others may stay in the organization, however, moving into...

Despite the amount of privatizations around the world in recent decades, only limited research attention has been paid to how privatization affects the employees. The effects are likely to vary depending on the individual's position in the organization. The aim of this study was to investigate how employees' work-related attitudes and strain change...

Patterns of career development have been found to be an important factor for long-term career rewards and well-being. However, existing career models excessively focus on men or elite women and upon paid work, typically without considering other roles. Based on a life course perspective, this study aimed to identify women's career development patte...

The public sectors in many developing countries have undergone major restructuring over the past decades. Earlier research suggests that such restructuring is inherently linked to feelings of ambiguity and insecurity among employees, undermining behavioral support for change, and thus, chances of change success. Using survey data from a restructure...

The development of commitment to change is an underresearched area especially in non-western settings. The aim of the present study was to determine whether employability can moderate the negative effects of job insecurity on individuals' commitment to change. A survey method approach was used to collect 149 responses from managers of a large publi...

The year 2010 represents an important year in job insecurity research, as represented by the publication of two special issues. In addition to the present one, the journal International Studies of Management & Organization publishes a special issue (Reisel and Probst, 2010) dedicated to the research initiative developed by Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt...

Exit, voice, loyalty, or neglect as employee responses to organizations in decline have been investigated in several studies. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether employability moderates the effects of job insecurity on exit, voice, loyalty and neglect. The results, based on questionnaire data from white-collar workers in Sweden (...

Previous research on the consequences of job insecurity has for the most part focused on individual as well as organizational outcomes, but rarely considered potential family consequences. Based on longitudinal data from Swedish teachers, the present study tests the relation between job insecurity and work—family conflict. In addition, workload was...

Most studies on the relationship between job insecurity and well-being have focused on the effects of employees' overall concerns about the continued existence of the job as such (quantitative job insecurity). Comparatively little research has examined perceived threats to valued job features (qualitative job insecurity). The overall aim of this st...

Unions frequently restructure through merger, most often in the form of absorptions involving one bigger union absorbing a smaller one. However, the individual-level effects of merger resulting in big amorphous organisations remain unclear. In this article, we highlight the role of the individual member in union absorptions, and investigate the rel...

Psychosocial work conditions including high demands, lack of control and support have been linked to poor health. Yet, the influence of individual factors such as general mental ability (GMA) remains to be examined. The present study set out to investigate how childhood mental ability and psychosocial work characteristics relate to different health...