Proactive coping and job insecurity among solo self-employed workers: Investigating a cyclic model with monthly measures

Job insecurity can harm workers' health and work performance. Adding to prior research that has mostly identified ways to minimize job insecurity among regular workers (e.g., employment protection legislation), the current research focusses on solo self-employed workers to investigate whether they can influence job insecurity by their own means. Based on proactive coping theory and conservation of resources theory, we propose a cyclic model in which proactive coping and job insecurity influence each other. We expect that more proactive coping during a month relates to less current job insecurity through the accumulation of career resources during the month and that current job insecurity relates to less proactive coping during the next month through psychological strain. We test whether trait self-compassion and recovery experiences mitigate this negative relationship of job insecurity via psychological strain with later proactive coping. The multi-level path modelling results from a 5-wave monthly survey study among 243 solo self-employed workers show that proactive coping during a month decreases current job insecurity via increased career resources. However, while current job insecurity positively related to current psychological strain, this strain was not related to proactive coping during the next month. We found some indication that trait self-compassion may weaken the negative relationship of job insecurity with psychological strain, but found no moderating role of recovery experiences. Instead, recovery experiences directly positively related to proactive coping. We recommend future researchers to further investigate our cyclic model and to sample less advantaged workers to gain better insight into potential loss cycles.