Things will never be the same again?Career prospects before and after the onset of the Great Recession -a multi-level perspective

Description

The Great Recession has raised unemployment rates around the world. Broadcasting pessimistic forecasts, the media influence public discourse and expectations of future developments. Labor market data should thus also affect how individuals perceive their career prospects. Connecting multiple levels of analysis, we first analyze the effect of two macro- and meso-level economic indicators, unemployment rate and employer’s prosperity, on individuals’ perceived career prospects and job insecurity. Second, we explore potential effects of the Great Recession on the relationship between the two economic indicators and employees’ perceived career prospects. Our results suggest that with increasing unemployment rates, individuals expect their chances to obtain employment to decrease. The unemployment rate affected employees’ perceived job security. Our results also suggest that how employees perceive their job security is related to their employer’s economic prosperity: The better their organization has developed in the year prior to the survey, the lower are their perceptions of job insecurity. Finally, the effect of the unemployment rate on individuals’ perceived employability is stronger for the period 2009-2013 than for prior to the crisis. Apparently, the Great Recession has influenced individuals’ mindsets in a way that they are now more sensitive to the macro-economic context and feel more vulnerable to worsening conditions in the labor market. Similarly, job security is now apparently perceived as more contingent upon the employer’s prosperity than prior to the crisis, which implies that employees’ perceptions have strengthened that their employer’s prosperity may protect them against job loss or that a decline of their employer’s situation signals a higher risk of job loss.

Period	5 Aug 2016 → 9 Aug 2016
Event title	76th Academy of Management Meeting
Event type	Unkonwn
Degree of Recognition	International