New team, new opportunities? The influence of a job change on well-being, social relationships and job satisfaction: A longitudinal survey study

Job changes are among the most formative events in professional life - they open up new opportunities, but also pose exciting challenges in terms of reorientation. The Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC, Haslam et al., 2021) provides a theoretical foundation for researching job changes, by emphasizing the influence of changes in social group memberships on psychological well-being during life-changing events. The aim of the study presented here is to analyze the effects of a job change on well-being, social relationships, job satisfaction, as well as occupational and organizational identity, and to compare these with the experiences of people who have been working in the same job for a longer period of time. To our knowledge it is also the first study to apply the SIMIC to job transitions. At baseline (T1) the study included 435 participants in in the job change group (people who had changed their job within the last three months) and 176 people in the control group (people, who had not changed their job in over two years). Some participants had to be removed due to inferior data quality, so we invited a total of 548 people to the second wave. Of these, 257 people in the job change group and 145 people from the control group took part in the second wave. Data collection for the third wave is still ongoing. A three- wave longitudinal survey study was conducted with each time point 8 weeks apart. Da will be analyzed using independent samples t-tests, a Structural Equation Model (SEM), a Latent Growth Model (LGM), bivariate correlations and a MANOVA.