Job Insecurity and Well-Being: Integrating Life History and Transactional Stress Theories

The current research proposes and tests a novel model explaining how job insecurity shapes well-being and has consequences for stratification and inequality. I draw on evolutionary life history theory, which proposes that growing up in a poorer versus wealthier environment impacts the sense of control people feel when exposed to threat in adulthood. I integrate this perspective with transactional stress theory to propose that job insecurity has a disproportionately negative effect on employees from poorer backgrounds, leading to lower engagement and higher emotional exhaustion among such employees, while those from wealthier backgrounds are buffered against these effects. These responses to job insecurity, in turn, amplify job loss risk for employees from poorer backgrounds, regardless of employees’ current job or financial situation. A preregistered, multisource, five-wave longitudinal study conducted at the height of the COVID-19 crisis in India found support for these predictions. A follow-up quasi-experiment conducted in India and the United States replicated the effects on engagement and exhaustion. The impact of job insecurity on well-being is stratified and acts as a mechanism that reproduces childhood inequalities.