The Content of the Psychological Work Contract for Frontline Police Officers

Adding to the field of knowledge on the content of the psychological work contract, structured interviews with 35 frontline police officers generated 662 responses relating to the content of the psychological work contract for this employment sector. Analysis of these responses resulted in the development of an initial two-component measure of the contract. One component (17 items) reflected the obligations arising from the promises officers believed the organisation had made to them. The other component (19 items) reflected the obligations arising from the promises officers believed they had made to the organisation. The measure was included in a survey completed by 84 frontline police officers. Factor analysis revealed two factors in each component. For the organisation's obligations component, one factor reflected obligations related more to the organisational environment, whereas the other factor reflected obligations related more to the job environment. For the employee's obligations component, one factor reflected obligations related more to behaviours on the job, whereas the other factor reflected obligations related more to the pursuit of development opportunities. The nature of the relationships that emerged between the psychological contract and the nomological network variables included in the study provide strong support for the validity of this measure of the psychological contract

Testing Contract Theory: A Survey of Some Recent Work

While the theoretical literature on contracts has been enormous since the seventies, empirical tests of the theory have long remained scarce. However, new empirical work has been developed in the last ten years that sheds light on the empirical validation of the theory. This paper aims at surveying the recent empirical work on contracts. The focus throughout is on the need to properly account for unobserved heterogeneity.

Reletting the Abandoned or Defaulted Public Works Project in New York- To Bid or Not to Bid?

The general requirement that contracts for public works be let pursuant to advertisements for bids to the lowest responsible bidder has long been the law in New York and other jurisdictions. After determining that the mandatory statutory pronouncements apply to a particular contract, there is an entire second level problem of the propriety of bids and the awarding of the contract pursuant thereto. Suppose a contractor has defaulted or abandoned a valid public works contract. Must the public entity now readvertise for bids for the completion of the work? The answer in most instances is no, and this raises the disconcerting specter of a single unsupervised public official having the power to let potentially huge contracts. Of course the size of the relet contract is not the prime consideration. The key point is that the laboriously developed bidding laws can be circumvented in default and abandonment situations, resulting in favortism for the contractor and a bad bargain for the taxpayers. However, the other side of the question is equally vexing. An abandoned or defaulted contract may require immediate continuation or remedial action. If such situations do not fit into the public emergency exception, must the public body expend the time, effort, and expense to analyze the supplies needed or work remaining, formulate proposed contracts, and advertise for bids? This article will analyse this difficulty in the context of the confusing and conflicting status of the legal requirements in New York for the reletting of abandoned or defaulted work

Work management plan for data systems and analysis directorate

A contract with the Data Systems and Analysis Directorate contains a specified level of resources related to a specific set of work in support of three divisions within the Data Systems and Analysis Directorate. The divisions are Institutional Data Systems Division, Ground Data Systems Division, and Mission Planning and Analysis Division. The Statement of work defines at a functional requirements level the type of support to be provided to the three divisions. The contract provides for further technical direction to the contractor through issuance of Job Orders. The Job order is the prime method of further defining the work to be done, allocating a portion of the total resources in the contract to the defined tasks, and further delegating technical responsibility

Development, design, fabrication and evaluation of a real-time video compression system

This is the final report on the work done by David Hein at the NASA-AMES Research Center. The main emphasis is on the work done on the Conditional Replenishment Emulator. The progress for May and a description of the emulator are given. Brief summaries of the work that was done in the other areas covered by the contract over the entire contract period are also provided

Studies in upper and lower atmosphere coupling

The theoretical and data-analytic work on upper and lower atmosphere coupling performed under a NASA Headquarters contract during the period April 1978 to March 1979 are summarized. As such, this report is primarily devoted to an overview of various studies published and to be published under this contract. Individual study reports are collected as exhibits. Work performed under the subject contract are in the following four areas of upper-lower atmosphere coupling: (1) Magnetosphere-ionosphere electrodynamic coupling in the aurora; (2) Troposphere-thermosphere coupling; (3) Ionosphere-neutral-atmosphere coupling; and (4) Planetary wave dynamics in the middle atmosphere

Contract Governance and the Canadian Public Sector

This essay examines the changing character of public sector work in the Canadian federal public service context. It is based on an empirical examination of various forms of contractual relations currently operative within the Canadian state and on a comparative approach of other western liberal state reform initiatives. We argue that contract governance is an ongoing process involving distinct interrelations between the public and private sectors. In this context, we identify various forms of contract governance and flexibility schemes that have been enfolded and refolded into the conventional structures of governance, and unfolded into a liminal space between the state and civil society through the establishment of nonstandard work and the creation of alternative service delivery programmes

Incentivizing the Dynamic Workforce: Learning Contracts in the Gig-Economy

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions her wage only on possible outcomes. In this work, we consider a model in which the principal is unaware of the agent's utility and action space. She sequentially offers contracts to identical agents, and observes the resulting outcomes. We present an algorithm for learning the optimal contract under mild assumptions. We bound the number of samples needed for the principal obtain a contract that is within $\epsilon$ of her optimal net profit for every $\epsilon>0$

Contractual Incentive Provision and Commitment in Rent-Seeking Contests

In this paper, we consider a symmetric rent-seeking contest, where employees lobby for a governmental contract on behalf of firms. The only verifiable information is which firm is assigned the contract. We derive the optimal wage contracts of the employees and analyze, whether commitment by determining the wage contract prior to the competitor is profitable. This is indeed the case, i.e. firms prefer to move first in the wage-setting subgame. This complements previous work on rent-seeking contests emphasizing that commitment via rent-seeking expenditures is unprofitable in symmetric contests.Contest; First-Mover Advantage; Commitment; Wage Contract