The Impact of Unemployment Threat on Work Engagement: The Mediation of Emotional Blackmail
With the repeated outbreaks of the new crown epidemic starting in 2020, many small and micro enterprises have suffered a decline in business volume, or even closed down, which eventually led to employees being forced to leave. Unstable enterprises will also cause employees to feel a greater threat of unemployment. To reduce the probability of being forced to lose their work, they will be involute at work and devote more energy to work, which is to increase work Engagement. This paper constructs a model of unemployment threat on work Engagement to verify the actual work status of employees in the current Chinese environment.
This paper adopts a literature review method and questionnaire survey method to conduct research. A total of 554 valid questionnaires were collected. After passing the reliability and validity test, the results of the study found that: unemployment threat has a significant positive relationship with work engagement; unemployment threat has a significant positive relationship with emotional blackmail (negative harm and excessive praise); emotional blackmail (negative harm and excessive praise) have a significant negative relationship with work engagement; emotional blackmail (negative harm and excessive praise) has a mediating effect between unemployment threat and work engagement.
It is recommended to improve the awareness of emotional blackmail among employees in the organization, to avoid the situation of emotional blackmail by oneself or others.
Keywords: Work Engagement, Unemployment Threat, Emotional Blackmail
