Moonlighting - Is it a challenge to healthy organizational environment?

Abstract

Human beings are constantly thriving for security and satisfaction in every aspect of their life. We, being socially dependent on each other, have to rely on others as much as ourselves for fulfillment of these needs, because that is the environment we have been brought up in. An aspectthat has existed always yet surfaced majorly due to recent hit of COVID-19 pandemic and which needs to be addressed is the sense of professional security and how it affects the employees’ action and an organization as its result. Moonlighting, a practice of working a second job outside normal business hours, is one such phenomenon that tends to take place due to job insecurity, want of more income and dissatisfaction.The question ishow it affects the employee and the employer. If dissected from an employee’s point of view, he is surviving and dependent on a highly volatile environment and more so, recently. Such a level of uncertainty is always a trigger that leads one to moonlight and search for jobs apart from their primary jobs in order to earn more money, secure himself and his family. Furthermore, as said earlier, every employee is constantly looking for security and satisfaction from the employer in terms of motivation, assurance, career development, skill enhancement and acknowledgment. Lack of all these elements from the organization one is working for, can cause the employees to search for alternative paths where he might achieve this.