The importance of occupational insecurity as a stressor in a new world of work: A comparative analysis of younger and older workers

Introduction
The contemporary labour market is characterized by rapid technological developments that bring changes to working conditions and career landscapes alike. While digitalization offers many ways of managing the workflow and improving performance, it also poses additional challenges for employees. One such notable challenge is occupational insecurity (OCI), which reflects workers’ concern that the nature of their occupations might significantly change due to automation (i.e., content OCI) and/or fear that the occupation as such might become obsolete in the future (i.e., global OCI; Roll et al., 2023). Drawing on the Job Demands and Resources framework (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), this new form of insecurity can be conceptualized as an increasingly relevant psychosocial stressor, leading to undesirable effects in terms of employee health and performance. However, as this is a relatively new construct, empirical evidence about its functioning and salience in relation to other “new” job demands is scarce.
In the current study, we aim to bring more clarity about the nature of OCI in several ways. First, we test whether it is predictive of exhaustion and mental distancing from work, which refer to impaired ability and willingness to achieve optimal performance, respectively (Schaufeli et al., 2023). Second, we aim to determine its strength and relative contribution to these outcomes against the backdrop of other relevant stressors, such as intensified job and career planning demands. Finally, we seek to better understand the role of a person’s age in embracing the technological component at work by comparing the strain pathways between younger and older worker groups.
Method
The data were collected via an online survey. Individuals working in the French-speaking region of Belgium took part in the study (N = 501; mean age 38.17 years; 71.6 % female). They were split into younger (≤40 years, n = 294) and older (41+ years, n = 207) worker subsamples for analyses. Data analysis was performed using multi-group path modelling. In addition, relative weight analyses were carried out following the procedure developed by Tonidandel and LeBreton (2015).
Findings
Global OCI significantly predicted exhaustion among younger but not older employees. However, it had a lesser impact on exhaustion in terms of its relative weight compared to other technology-related stressors (such as increased availability) and intensified career planning demands. A different predictive pattern was observed in the older employee subsample. In this group, content OCI was a more relevant predictor of exhaustion. Regarding mental distance as an outcome, we also observed a somewhat different ranking of top-weighted predictors in the comparison groups. However, global OCI held equal importance in both subsamples and was the most salient predictor of mental distancing from work compared to other ICT-related stressors.
Implications
Our study expands the view of the “new” job demands by including two types of OCI among them. Our findings highlight that they may constitute significant psychosocial risks in the new world of work if not properly addressed. Moreover, we demonstrate that the implications of digitalization might be not the same for older and younger individuals.