The Role of Employability in Context of High Job Insecurity: A Framework for University Researchers

Due to a recent reform of the Higher Education (HE) system in Italy, the academic researchers now suffer for a higher job insecurity, which may have negative impact on their attitude and behaviour towards the job. The present work assumes that employability, here conceptualized as an individual perception of his/her chances in the labour market, can help researchers to deal with job insecurity. By reviewing recent literature, the present work presents a conceptual framework and the underlying hypothesis to examine the role of self-perceived employability in moderating the relationships between job insecurity and professional attitudes of academic researchers towards their job. In particular, the framework highlights the importance of contract type for the constructing of employees’ expectations toward the academic career development, with potential effects on individual public service motivation, and organizational outcome. The work also provides information on the road to test the proposed framework by illustrating the measures and the data collection process for completing the next stages of the research project. Although the work presents only a theoretical treatment of the issue, it is possible to identify the contribution of the research to the extant literature and the potential implications at both managerial and individual level.