Food insecurity is a public health issue for much of the world’s population, and yet management scholars have not addressed how this phenomenon might affect employees while on the job. In the current paper, we introduce the topic of food insecurity into the management literature and explore how this prevalent “out-of-work” experience affects employee performance at work. We use a self-regulation lens to propose that food insecurity is a strain on employees, leading to a decreased capacity to focus on their performance. Specifically, we propose that experiencing food insecurity evokes emotional, physiological, and cognitive strains, which in turn reduce job performance. Additionally, we explore whether there are accessible resources that individuals might draw upon to buffer these negative effects by examining mindfulness, social support, and emotional stability as moderators of the indirect effect of food insecurity on job performance. We utilize archival data to establish the importance of food insecurity in the workplace context (Study 1) and an ESM sample of customer service employees sampled over five weeks (Study 2) to test our hypotheses. We find robust support that food insecurity negatively impacts job performance through increased cognitive strain, but that mindfulness, social support, and emotional stability weaken this relationship. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
