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Job Insecurity in South African Organizations

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Job Insecurity in South African Organizations
CHAPTER FOUR

4.0 PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF DATA

Job insecurity has been conceptualised widely in the international literature. As early as 1965, researchers and writers identified job insecurity as a phenomenon to be considered in the changing world of work .Throughout the literature, job insecurity has been conceptualized from two distinct perspectives; namely global and multidimensional. The global perspective underwrites the assumption that job insecurity can be conceptualized as the overall concern about the future of one’s job. The literature shows the use of this conceptualisation in the context of change or crises, such as political change, mergers or reorganisations. In these cases, job insecurity is normally considered to be the phase prior to unemployment Multidimensional conceptualisations conversely hold the viewpoint that job insecurity is a more complex phenomenon than only the fear of losing a job and includes dimensions such as the fear of losing job features, including job stability, positive performance appraisals and promotions .
The wide range of conceptualisations in the literature shows the importance and relevance of this phenomenon to the industrial and business environment. Many researchers and leaders in the academic field led the search to arrive at a common conceptualisation of job insecurity and to embed it into a structured model Up to this point; no single conceptualisation or model has been developed and commonly accepted. after an extensive literature review, came to the conclusion that much still needs to be done in order to understand the full extent of the nature of job insecurity and to develop psychometrically valid and reliable measures. Studying the conceptualisation of job insecurity from a global and multidimensional perspective in the international literature led to the identification of five common themes in its conceptualisation, as discussed in the following sections.

The responses of the 40



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