Understanding Mental Well-Being in Contract-Based Employment: Job Insecurity and Quiet Quitting

Employee mental well-being has become a critical concern in contemporary organisations, especially as employment arrangements increasingly shift toward contract-based work. This paper examines how job insecurity affects the mental well-being of contract-based employees in Malaysia’s public sector. The relationship is explained through quiet quitting, which is conceptualised as a coping strategy in response to job insecurity. This study employed a quantitative, cross-sectional design involving 174 contract-based employees in the Klang Valley public sector. Data were collected through a survey using purposive sampling and analysed using PLS-SEM. The findings show that job insecurity is negatively related to mental well-being and positively related to quiet quitting. In turn, quiet quitting is negatively related to mental well-being. Furthermore, quiet quitting acts as a mediating mechanism linking job insecurity to mental well-being, suggesting that employees who experience higher job insecurity are more likely to engage in quiet quitting, which is associated with a decline in mental well-being. By integrating quiet quitting as a coping strategy within a Conservation of Resource framework, this study shows how quiet quitting helps explain the relationship between job insecurity and lower mental well-being in the context of contract-based employment.