Spillover and spillback: Linking daily job insecurity to next‐day counterproductive work behavior

Abstract

Spillover effect theory posits that work stressors can have spillover effects into workers' home lives. Although job insecurity spillover into the home domain has been explored extensively, potential spillback effects into the work domain have not. We posit that daily job insecurity represents a negative subjective perception that can spillover into the home domain and lead to insomnia, which will damage the recovery of self‐regulatory resources and make employees unable to regulate their own behavior, ultimately resulting in next‐day counterproductive work behavior. We hypothesized that self‐compassion, as an individual trait, weakens the spillover effect of job insecurity and moderates the indirect effect of job insecurity on next‐day counterproductive work behavior via insomnia. Our analyses of data collected from 132 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive working days showed that insomnia mediates the relationship between daily job insecurity and next‐day counterproductive work behavior, and further showed that this relationship was moderated by self‐compassion. Overall, our research captures the cascading effects of daily job insecurity and contributes to a more complete understanding of the spillover effect of job insecurity.