We draw on expectations states theory (Berger et al. 1977; Ridgeway 2001) as related to employees’ status beliefs about their managers. Specifically, we propose that managers’ characteristics – such as their gender, race, and tenure with the firm – lead the employees reporting to them to feel more (or less) protected at work. According to Ridgeway (2001, p. 638): “expectation states theory defines status beliefs as widely held cultural beliefs that link greater social significance and general competence, as well as specific positive and negative skills, with one category of social distinction (e.g., men) compared to another (e.g. women; Berger et al. 1977).” Status expectations can be contingent on processes operating within specific workplaces, as related to the goods or services provided by the organization, as well as associated with the traits emphasized in different social roles. For instance, Ridgeway (2001:638) points out that “evidence indicates that gender stereotypes do contain beliefs associating greater overall competence with men than women, particularly in more valued social arenas, while also granting each sex particular skills, such as mechanical ability for men and domestic skills for women.” In the evaluation of managers within the information technology workforce investigated in this study, we test whether employees might make the assessment that White and male managers with the longest tenure would have more clout and power to protect their direct reports from layoffs, given status expectations of managers with these characteristics. We choose a status expectation framework because we believe the main variable of interest—perceived job insecurity—represents employees’ cognitive assessments of their managers’ ability to stave off layoffs within their team. Such status beliefs tap into status perceptions by employees about the degree to which managers actually possess power or resources that will affect their own ability to remain employed in the organization (Ridgeway 2014). While our employee respondents may or may not have access to direct knowledge of their managers’ power or resources, we theorize that they nevertheless make inferences based on their managers’ status characteristics. Such status beliefs about their managers’ competence, resources, and power may be especially salient to employees’ assessment of their own job security (Ridgeway 2014).

This research builds on previous “micro” studies of individual job insecurity (Elman and O’Rand 2002; Fullerton and Wallace 2007) to investigate the “meso” context of work and analyzes managers’ influence on employees’ subjective experiences on the job (Briscoe and Kellogg 2011; Castilla 2011). Existing studies on job insecurity have already documented individual-level characteristics as predictors of perceived job insecurity (Fullerton and Wallace 2007). Employees’ own race, ethnicity, and age are associated with their perceived job insecurity (Fullerton and Wallace 2007; Fullerton and Anderson 2013; Wilson, Eitle, and Bishin 2006; Wilson and Mossakowski 2012). Specifically, Whites are less likely to feel insecure than non-Whites, and older/mid-career employees are more likely to feel vulnerable (Fullerton and Wallace 2007; Mendenhall et al. 2008; Newman 1999; Wilson and Mossakowski 2012). For example, one study using the 2000–2010 waves of the General Social Survey finds that the odds of high perceived job insecurity are 53% greater for African Americans and 77% greater for Hispanics, as compared to Whites (Fullerton and Anderson 2013). Those with less education also report higher perceived job insecurity (Elman and O’Rand 2002). Building on this literature on employees’ status characteristics, we test whether employees reporting to managers with different status characteristics may also report different levels of perceived job insecurity.

Status characteristics affect how employees are evaluated with regard to competence (Bell and Nkomo 2001; Roth 2004) and how employees fare on promotions, and the risk of termination (Ortiz and Roscigno 2009). We contend that employees may be making similar evaluations about their managers’ likelihood of being terminated or forced out.

Employees may hold status expectations about their managers that extend beyond ascriptive characteristics such as race and gender. For instance, Blair-Loy and Wharton (2002) hypothesized that a manager with longer organizational tenure may have more relative status. They find that powerful managers facilitate employees’ use of work-family policies. Following this line of reasoning, we theorize employees may perceive managers with longer tenure as more established and thus better able to protect them from layoffs, thereby lowering employees’ perceived job insecurity.

We hypothesize that employees make status expectations of their managers, with perceptions of managers’ higher status positively related to employees’ lower perceived job insecurity. This meso theoretical framing brings managers into the picture, thereby contextualizing employees’ assessments of their degree of job insecurity at the micro level.

We also draw upon crossover theory (Bakker, Westman, and van Emmerik 2009; Westman 2001) to propose that managers’ assessments of their personal job insecurity “crossover” to shape their employees’ assessments of their own insecurity (Carlson et al. 2011; Westman, Etzion and Danon 2001; Westman 2001). In other words, employees whose managers perceive their jobs to be insecure are more apt to feel the same way about their own jobs.

More generally, crossover theory suggests that the strain or stress one person experiences could affect those sharing a common social environment (Westman and Etzion 1995). Research on crossover has considered how employees’ job insecurity crosses over to affect their spouses (Westman et al. 2001; Wilson, Larson and Stone 1993) and children (Barling, Zacharatos and Hepburn 1999; Barling, Dupre and Hepburn 1998; Lim and Sng 2006; Zhao, Lim and Teo 2012). For instance, previous studies have investigated parents’ job insecurity, finding an association with their young adult children’s work attitudes and beliefs (Barling et al. 1998), cognitive ability and academic performance (Barling et al. 1999), extrinsic and intrinsic motivation towards work (Lim and Sng 2006), and career self-efficacy (Zhao et al. 2012). In one study of 98 couples working for the same firm, Westman and colleagues (2001) find that the job insecurity of husbands and wives are positively correlated, suggesting that job insecurity might cross over from one to the other.

Given power differences and dynamics at the workplace, we might expect an even greater crossover effect of insecurity from managers to their direct reports. We theorize when managers are themselves insecure and at risk of losing their own jobs, employees may perceive managers as no longer able to protect them from the risk of layoff, in turn reporting higher job insecurity. We draw on data with individual IT employees and managers nested in teams, to test whether having a manager with high job insecurity in fact translates into employees’ own higher perceived insecurity.

Our second set of research questions examines whether employees surveyed right after a merger announcement report higher perceived job insecurity, as well as whether specific characteristics of managers buffer (or conversely magnify) knowledge of an impending merger. Seldom are scholars able to be “on the ground” when major organizational restructuring occurs. A few longitudinal studies have followed employees in specific workplaces as they restructured over time, but these have primarily been studies of public employees in Europe, such as in the UK, Finland and the Netherlands (Ferrie et al. 1998; Kivimaki et al. 2000, 2001; Swaen et al. 2004).

Existing studies have largely focused on actual downsizing and characteristics of those who are laid off (Dencker 2008; Elvira and Zatzick 2002; Fernandez 2001; Kalev 2014), while less is known about perceived job insecurity once an unexpected restructuring is announced. We use the announcement of an impending organizational change occurring in the middle of data collection as a defining break in the organizational climate to investigate the possibility of a different relationship between manager status characteristics and employees’ perceived job insecurity for those who knew about an upcoming merger when they were interviewed, compared to those who were interviewed before the merger announcement was made. We assess whether managers’ characteristics might be even more strongly associated with employees’ perceived job insecurity for those interviewed after the merger was announced, as employees might look to their managers to a greater extent for a sense of security and direction during this period of uncertainty.

In sum, this study builds on and extends a larger recent literature underscoring manager effects on employees, such as consequences for utilizing flexible work policies, access to reputation-building projects and career outcomes, and influencing other managers’ evaluation of employees’ performance (Blair-Loy and Wharton 2002; Briscoe and Kellogg 2011; Castilla 2011). To do so, we draw on both status expectations theory and crossover theory to assess whether managers’ characteristics, including their own assessment of their personal job insecurity, are associated with employees’ perceptions of job insecurity. We also consider the organizational climate, testing whether managers play an even greater role in shaping employees’ perceived security or insecurity when employees have just learned that their firm will be undergoing significant restructuring.

We draw on data from the Work, Family & Health Network Study (WFHN), a group randomized experiment carried out in the IT division of a Fortune-500 company, given the pseudonym TOMO (see Bray et al. 2013, King et al. 2012). The IT division of this company develops new software for the company’s external business as well as internal needs and maintains the software systems that are an essential part of this organization’s business. Some employees in the study focus primarily on the core business of the division (i.e., software development) while others support the development teams through operational, quality assurance, and programmatic support.

In the IT division, employees are organized into work teams, with each having a primary manager guiding their overall work. These work teams are organized under Directors who report to Vice Presidents who focus on either development tasks and quality assurance or the support and programmatic part of the business. Vice Presidents and Directors were not surveyed in the study, but front-line managers supervising employees were.

The study draws on computer-assisted personal interviews lasting about 60 minutes conducted by trained field interviewers at the workplace on company time. The surveys were connected through team identifiers permitting us to link responses from employees and their supervising managers.

Overall, 1,182 employees in the IT division were eligible to complete the survey and 823 did so, for a 69.6% response rate. Employees’ managers were surveyed as well, with 256 managers eligible and 221 managers responding, for an 86.3% response rate. We employed listwise deletion based on item non-response, resulting in an analytic sample of 666 employees.ⁱ Tests of differences between individuals in our analytic sample and those excluded due to missing variables show that respondents in our analytic sample are more likely to have heard about the merger (57% vs. 35%, p<0.001). Respondents are also more likely to have a college degree (80% vs. 67%, p<0.001), and to report to a manager with longer tenure (16.75 years vs. 12.73 years; p<0.05).

During the course of data collection, a merger was announced by top executives, and received immediate attention by the media and the employees at the company. Given that the merger was announced at one point in time even as employees, managers, and their work teams were staggered in their completion of the surveys (depending on when they were randomly assigned to do so over a period of a year), comparison groups emerged based on the timing of when respondents were surveyed in relation to learning about the merger. More than half (57%) of the employee respondents in our analytic sample completed the survey prior to the merger announcement, while the remainder of the sample (43%) took the survey after this upcoming change was announced.

The notion of lifelong, continuous employment is increasingly a remnant of the past, described as a false “career mystique” (Moen and Roehling 2005) that nevertheless continues to permeate organizational and governmental policies and practices, as well as individual expectations about stable work, job security, and a steady stream of income. But research shows a steady upward trend in subjective job insecurity (see Fullerton and Wallace 2007), even as perceived job insecurity has been linked to lower levels of employee health and well-being (Burgard, Brand and House 2009; Ferrie et al. 2005; László et al. 2010). These trends and impacts highlight the importance of understanding the multilayered contexts of contemporary insecurity among even advantaged workers, such as those working in IT jobs.

Moving beyond existing research, we have considered multilevel effects of both the organizational climate and managers’ characteristics, over and above employees’ own characteristics. To do so we draw on theories of status expectations and crossover to hypothesize and test whether managers’ characteristics and sense of job insecurity shape the sense of job insecurity of the employees reporting to them.

We find that, in contrast to Hypothesis 1, net of individual characteristics, neither managers’ gender nor their tenure within the organization is associated with employees’ perceived job insecurity. But as hypothesized, their managers’ race/ethnicity is associated with employees’ perceived job insecurity. However, contrary to Hypothesis 1, it is those employees who have an Asian rather than a White manager who tend to report less perceived job insecurity, suggesting that cognitive attributions by employees of status in an IT workforce may favor Asian over White managers. Future research should test whether in IT environments it is Asians who possess greater status, thereby being perceived as better able to protect the jobs of those working under them. The unique racial demographics of the information technology industry, which has a disproportionately higher percentage of Asians, points to the need to think about and theorize race in work organization contexts that move beyond the White/non-White dichotomy.

We find support for Hypothesis 2, in that working for managers who have high perceived job insecurity magnifies employees’ own sense of insecurity. This follows from crossover theory, suggesting that managers’ assessments of their own perceived job insecurity crosses over to shape employees’ own sense of perceived job insecurity. This finding suggests the need for future longitudinal studies assessing the nature and direction of changes in both managers’ and employees’ sense of insecurity as well as other appraisals of their situations.

This study serendipitously provided the opportunity to examine perceived job insecurity in the context of an unexpected merger announcement. We take advantage of the fact that a merger was announced in the middle of data collection, using the announcement as a demarcation of two climates at this one corporation. The fact that some employees were surveyed prior to and some after the merger announcement provided two very different organizational climates: one of relative stability and another more precarious, colored by the uncertainty of what a merger may mean in terms of layoffs. Not surprisingly, in support of Hypothesis 3, those who knew about the merger announcement when interviewed reported considerably higher levels of perceived job insecurity. We also find support for Hypothesis 4, such that manager characteristics (specifically having long tenure) and managers’ assessments of their job security serve to moderate the effects on employees’ perceived job insecurity of the uncertainty generated by concerns about the forthcoming merger. We find evidence of a buffering effect, in that employees who knew about the merger (i.e., employees who were interviewed after the announcement was made) who worked under managers with long tenure were more likely to have lower perceived job insecurity; in contrast, for employees interviewed before the merger announcement, we find no relationship between managers’ tenure and employees’ perceived job insecurity. This may reflect the greater salience of status expectations in an uncertain climate, with employees assessing long tenured managers as having greater status, and thus possibly able to protect their teams in the face of the merger. But there is also evidence of an intensification effect of working for managers who are worried about losing their own jobs. Specifically, the positive crossover relationship linking managers’ perceived job insecurity with that of their employees’ perceived job insecurity appears to be the case only in a climate of uncertainty (for those surveyed after the merger announcement as compared to those who were unaware of the upcoming merger). This points to a fertile future research agenda incorporating layers of context – in this case managers’ characteristics and working in a climate of uncertainty. The contribution of this study lies in our moving beyond individualistic models of job insecurity to incorporate contextual and organizational factors as well. We also extend the implications of the theoretical framework on status expectations, by highlighting that status expectations may not be static, but contingent on contexts that may be continually evolving. This is shown in our findings, in the shifting importance of different manager characteristics that signal status, leading to differences in employee insecurity. We find that having an Asian manager may signal higher status in this specific organization and IT workforce, while having a manager with longer tenure may be more salient in light of an impending organizational change, providing an example of changing status markers as the context changes.

There are several important limitations, however. First, the merger announcement occurred within a broader context of a global economic crisis touching both the local and the larger national economy. In analysis not reported here, we have adjusted for unemployment rates at national, state, and local levels and found similar results (not shown; available from authors). While other studies have pointed to important differences across national contexts in the shaping of perceived job insecurity, what we contribute here is to highlight the importance as well of the meso contexts of teams and organizational climates. A second limitation is that we are limited to a single, one-item measure of perceived job insecurity. However, this is a common measure of perceived job insecurity. And in analysis not shown we have also tried dichotomizing the outcome, finding similar results (not shown; available from authors). A third limitation is the fact that the sample is of a specific workforce, and hence we are unable to speak to the generalizability of the findings. Yet, we believe the implications of our findings are important in establishing empirically the role of managers in predicting employees’ perceived job insecurity, theorizing the importance of employees’ status expectations of their managers (as gauged by managers’ characteristics). Note that we cannot make any causal claims, given the cross sectional nature of our data. However, the conclusions we draw are on the basis of regressions that are consistent with what theory would predict.

Given the nature of contemporary work experience, losing a job may also not be as important as being able to reclaim a similar one. However, a t-test shows that in contrast to perceived job insecurity, workers’ reported employability (encompassing workers’ skill sets and knowledge) is not sensitive to the announcement of the merger (not shown; available from authors). That is, while employees’ perceived likelihood of losing their job differs by when they were surveyed as related to the merger announcement as expected, their reported likelihood of finding a similar job does not relate to the merger announcement. We also test employability as a dependent variable in regression models, finding that in contrast to perceived job insecurity, none of the manager characteristics predicts worker employability once controlling for workers’ individual characteristics (not shown; available from authors).

Uncertainty increasingly characterizes the contemporary global economy, making both organizational restructuring and employee perceived job insecurity key issues for policy and practice as well as for future research. The findings reported here are important, in that they locate employees’ psychosocial assessments within the context of their experiences on the job, in this case defined by their managers’ own relative status and managers’ own sense of perceived insecurity.

Front-line managers are often depicted as the interpreters of the larger organization to their direct reports. What our findings suggest is that employees interpret their own situations based on their status expectations about their managers, especially under conditions of uncertainty. Having a manager with long tenure and job security serves to predict employees’ own sense of security. Working for a high status manager (in this environment a manager who is Asian) also reduces employees’ perceptions of their job insecurity. This points to the need for additional research on the multilayered contexts of employment that serve to define the situations and stresses of employees, as well as ways to mitigate the uncertainty and insecurity associated with the restructuring that is increasingly common in today’s unsettled economic climate.