Global Work Watch has written a fair amount about worker insecurity in the today’s international economy. But the issue of employment stability extends into the executive ranks as well.

A couple of recent reports suggest that a tumultuous market—rife with mergers, layoffs and job hopping—may be a bummer both for senior managers and the companies they serve.

In its Employee Engagement Report 2008, consulting firm BlessingWhite found that engagement levels were highest for people holding job titles of vice president or above. Still, only 47 percent of those executives were engaged, leaving more than half with “less-than-ideal emotional connection and alignment.”

A story on the report by Human Resource Executive magazine quoted Hewitt Associates consultant Ray Baumruk to explain the situation. Baumruk cited shrinking job tenure among executives as one of the factors that harms engagement. “Executives are human and not immune to the stress of the growing pace of change and job security concerns,” he said.

Disengaged managers are a problem for businesses not only because of their immediate impact on firms but also because leadership looms as a key challenge in the coming years. Management skills are the top priority for organizations as they think about their future talent needs, according to a new study from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report, which surveyed nearly 600 executives in developed countries, found that the ability to deal with and manage change was the most cited skill seen as critical to success over the next three years. The next most-cited skills were strategic thinking ability and communication and interpersonal skills.

Job hopping and getting laid off might help some people learn how to deal with change, nut it’s also likely that short stints will get in the way of soaking in leadership lessons. The sort of “soft” management skills in demand seem to me to come best from sticking with a post for a while and wrestling with tough situations over time.

Without giving leaders time to develop and teams time to jell, even the best talent can be wasted. Consider this comment from University of Michigan business professor Dave Ulrich in the Economist Intelligence Unit study: “Talent without teamwork is not sufficient. If you have talent that cannot work together, you have an all-star team, but they’re not going to win: you keep buying free agents, but they don’t play well together.”

(Business software firm SAP sponsored a roundtable discussion of the Economist Intelligence Unit report at its recent user conference. I took part in the forum, and it can be found here: http://wwwmedia.sap.com/replay/global/sapphire/orlando08/080505_11am_SAPHIRE_Roundtable_200k.asf).

So let’s see: Management ability is crucial, but managers are feeling alienated from their firms, partly because of the turbulent economy and its job insecurity.

Doesn’t that argue for creating a calmer business climate and more stable employment—even for those in the C-suites?