With a Little Help from My Friends (and Substitutes): Social Referents and Influence in Psychological Contract Fulfillment

This study investigated employees’ choice of social referents and the impact of social influence on their beliefs of psychological contract fulfillment. Using data from a field study conducted with 99 employees in a research organization, we found that one’s referent choice varied with the domain of promise evaluated. When evaluating the organization’s fulfillment of organization-wide promises, employees’ referents were primarily coworkers with whom they had close direct ties, namely, friends and advice givers. On the other hand, when evaluating the fulfillment of job-related promises, employees’ referents were mainly fellow workers who could substitute for them and people with whom they had multiple relationships. The effects of social influence also varied with the domain of promise evaluated. For organization-wide promises, employees’ fulfillment evaluations were similar to those of their friends. However, for job-related promises, their fulfillment evaluations were dissimilar to those of coworkers who played the dual roles of friends and substitutes. This study advances psychological contracts research by demonstrating that third parties to the psychological contract can influence fulfillment evaluations. In turn, the effect of such influence is contingent on the domain of promises being evaluated and the nature of the networks. We discuss implications for research in psychological contracts, social networks and influence, and referent choice

Integrating Employment Contracts and Comparisons: What One Can Teach Us about the Other

This study examines the events that trigger individuals to consider the social exchanges involved in their employment relationships. Integrating social comparison and psychological contract literature streams, a parallel is drawn between system-referent comparisons and psychological contract evaluations. We hypothesize that self- and other-referent comparisons may be human triggers for engaging in this type of comparison. A variety of structural triggers are also proposed to influence psychological contract evaluations. This field study examines these primary and secondary contract makers as social comparison triggers. Results support the hypotheses that the triggers identified predict psychological contract evaluation and that psychological contract breach is correlated with these evaluations. Implications for future research and managerial practice are discussed

What happens to others matters! An intraindividual processual approach to coworkers’ psychological contract violations

Drawing on recent research highlighting the dynamic and social properties of psychological contracts, we propose a framework that examines socially embedded triggers and their impact on psychological contract change. Our model accounts for the social context in which individuals’ sensemaking process about their employment relationship occurs. The model specifies how individuals make sense of coworkers’ psychological contract violation and integrate that information into the creation of a plausible convergent or divergent account. These accounts have the potential to reinforce or initiate a review of the terms of the individual’s psychological contract schema, or they may leave the schema intact. Research and practical implications of this conceptual framework are discussed

What happens to others matters! An intra-individual processual approach to coworkers’ psychological contract violations

Drawing on recent research highlighting the dynamic and social properties of psychological contracts, we propose a framework that examines socially embedded triggers and their impact on psychological contract change. Our model accounts for the social context in which individuals’ sensemaking process about their employment relationship occurs. The model specifies how individuals make sense of coworkers’ psychological contract violation and integrate that information into the creation of a plausible convergent or divergent account. These accounts have the potential to reinforce or initiate a review of the terms of the individual’s psychological contract schema, or they may leave the schema intact. Research and practical implications of this conceptual framework are discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Psychological contract development: An integration of existing knowledge to form a temporal model

The psychological contract has received substantial theoretical attention over the past two decades as a popular framework within which to examine contemporary employment relationships. Previous research mostly examines breach and violation of the psychological contract and its impact on employee organization outcomes. Few studies have employed longitudinal, prospective research designs to investigate the psychological contract and as a result, psychological contract content and formation are incompletely understood. It is argued that employment relationships may be better proactively managed with greater understanding of formation and changes in the psychological contract. We examine existing psychological contract literature to identify five key factors proposed to contribute to the formation of psychological contracts. We extend the current research by integrating these factors for the first time into a temporal model of psychological contract development

A co-evolutionary model of newcomers’ psychological contract formation: the role of social networks

The psychological contract, the perceived mutual obligations between employer and employee, is a critical construct for understanding employment relationships and how their management informs employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Extensive work has focused on the outcomes of the contract’s operation, but there remains a paucity of research examining its formation and the role of ‘others’, within and outside the organization, in the development process. While important work has drawn on social network theorizing to explore how social interactions shape contract perceptions, the relationships posited remain largely uni- directional, highlighting another overarching limitation in the contract literature: a lack of dynamic theorizing. To address these gaps, our conceptual paper adopts a process-based lens to calibrate a co-evolutionary model of contract formation that explicates the reciprocal relationship between newcomers’ social networks and their psychological contract development. Grounded in a structuration perspective (Giddens, 1976), we draw on a range of dynamic theories to move the contract literature beyond examining static relationships to comprehensively theorize contracting as a process co-evolving with social network development in early socialization stages. We conclude by highlighting the theoretical and practical implications of our model

Towards Understanding Psychological Contract Breach from Employees’ Perspective in Pakistan (A Sense Making Model Approach)

This research aims to study psychological contract breach using sense making from the employees’ perspective.  In the subject of human resources management, the term ‘Psychological Contract' refers to the actual but unwritten expectancy of an employee toward their employer (Shruthi, & Hemanth, 2012). This study involves the data collection from twelve interviews following critical incident technique. The findings support the survey on psychological contract breach that how employees feel when their promises breach and feel betray and revealing both the prevalence and the negative consequences of contract breach. This study focuses on the important but neglected issue of when perceptions of psychological contract breach and feelings of violation are likely to arise. The results provide insight into when psychological contract breach and violation are most likely to be experienced. How people get neglected by management and no interest to work anymore. The results are useful for the employers to prepare the Human Resource policy for their organizations. Keywords: psychological contracts, breach of contract, critical incident technique, interviews, employees, Pakista

Toward A Better Understanding Of Psychological Contract Fulfillment (pcf) At The Team Level

Despite the fact that the literature on psychological contracts has flourished in the last 20 years (Rousseau, 2011; Zhao et al., 2007), prior research provides limited insight about what psychological contract fulfillment (PCF) represents at higher levels of analysis. A growing line of research has started to empirically assess the existence of PCF at the team level of analysis (e.g. De Vos & Tekleab, 2014) and new theoretical developments have been recently published (e.g., Laulié & Tekleab, 2016). However, several questions remain unanswered as the literature is still in a fledging state. In this dissertation, I develop and test a model of shared PCFs at the team level. Hypotheses were examined in an organization in Chile using data from multiple teams, multiple times, and multiple sources. The results show that employees of the same team tend to share their opinions about how the organization fulfills the promises to all the team members and to the team as a whole, creating a shared, emergent team-level phenomenon. The results also support that justice climate and perceived organizational support climate were significant antecedents of shared PCFs. Shared PCFs were significant predictors of team organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), average turnover intentions, and team engagement. Moreover, the results support that the effects of shared PCFs on different team outcomes are generally stronger than the effects of individual PCF on individual-level outcomes. In addition, team affective tone was found to be an important mediator between shared PCFs and team outcomes. Shared PCFs were also significant moderators of the relationship between individual PCF and some specific individual-level outcomes (contextual performance, turnover intentions). Implications for theory and practice are also discussed