Job-related uncertainty and its pernicious effects on employees’ well-being: The mediating role of employee job anxiety

Employees’ affective well-being may be negatively affected by situations in which there is a lack of information on their future in the job. Yet, further knowledge is needed regarding the mechanisms that underlie this relationship, as it could help managers to counteract the pernicious effects of uncertainty situations on firms. One potential underlying mechanism could be the level of anxiety experienced by the employees in uncertainty situations, especially when these situations are perceived as threats to their immediate job future. Structural equation modelling, specifically through partial least squares -Smart PLS 4.0- and responses from a sample of 205 hotel employees in Spain after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic were used to test this point. The findings revealed that job-related uncertainty perceptions reduce the affective well-being of employees not directly but rather indirectly by increasing their level of anxiety, which reveals that the predicted full mediating effect of employee anxiety was confirmed. This study thus demonstrated that job anxiety is increased by job-related uncertainty perceptions and that job anxiety reduces the affective well-being of employees, something that can endanger firm competitiveness in any sector. Managers should therefore activate policies and systems permitting to reduce the level of anxiety of their employees, so that their well-being cannot be reduced when uncertainty hits their firms.