Security Abeyance: Coping with the Erosion of Job Conditions and Treatment

Abstract

The construct of security abeyance is proposed to explain how general insecurity might commonly arise during organizational restructuring. Security abeyance refers to feelings of general insecurity that emerge in work settings where there is an absence of information about the meaning and intention of organizational change. The value of the abeyance construct is explored using a study of change in the air traffic sector. For security abeyance to emerge, unreadable management actions needed to be also accompanied by confusions about the worker's organizational value. In the face of an enduring frustration of meaning, initial, neutral attempts at sensemaking gave way to more proactive efforts to provoke management into clarifying workers' futures. Resolution of the abeyance predicament was found to require workers to let go of attempts to evaluate their current, personal worth to the organization and to extensively re-evaluate their long-term relationship with management. However, the emergence of highly distrustful worker constructions of management did not affect other, established organizational attachments. The case for developing security abeyance research is made.