2021 presidential address a year to remember: an extraordinary journey onto a promising path of inclusion and agility

As I preparedmy presidential address, what came to mind wasMischel's (1977: 346) work on situational strength, when he asked: "When are situations most likely to exert powerful effects and, conversely,when are person variables likely to bemost influential?" Situations matter most when they are strong, as they constrain options and provide clear signals about expectations. My presidential year provided a strong situation in the form of COVID-19 and the surging visibility of racial inequality in society. Both of thesewere united in their focus on the absence of health-the loss of life from COVID-19 or from racist brutality

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

The impact of a TQM intervention on work attitudes: a longitudinal case study

Total Quality Management (TQM) has been heralded as a new way of managing organizations. While there are widespread endeavours by organizations to implement TQM, a visible lag exists between the adoption of TQM and a systematic evaluation of this phenomenon. The thesis, therefore, addresses a fundamental question in TQM; what is the impact, if any, of a TQM intervention on employee work attitudes? This 'before and after study' examines the impact of a 'soft' TQM intervention on two key elements of TQM: teamwork and continuous improvement. A questionnaire was completed by respondents six months prior to and nine months after the launch of the intervention. The starting point in the evaluation is the development of theoretical models containing hypothesized antecedents of teamwork and continuous improvement which are empirically tested on the data. The intervention is then evaluated on the basis of its direct and indirect effects on the two key elements of TQM. In addition, the impact of the intervention is assessed both at the individual and the organizational level. At the individual level, the intervention was found to have a significant effect on team orientation as well as on a number of dimensions of continuous improvement, including general orientation to quality, improvement as part of the job and intrinsic motivation. However, a significant overall improvement at the organizational level was not evidenced in any of these variables. This raises the possibility that a longer time lag may be required for the individual level effects to develop into an overall organizational improvement. Additional important findings emerged from this evaluation. First, a consistent finding throughout is the importance of supervisory behaviour in affecting employee attitudes. Second, employee assessment of the intervention is a more significant predictor of subsequent changes than employee participation in the intervention per se. Finally, the prior experience and attitudes of individuals have a significant effect on how the intervention is assessed, which subsequently affects changes in attitudes, highlighting the fact that organizational change interventions do not occur in a vacuum

When organisations break promises to an employee, others may feel it too

Employees pay attention to how their co-workers are treated. Depending on the circumstances, what happens to colleagues can disrupt and undermine the quality of the relationship an employee develops with the organisation. Sandra Costa and Jacqueline Coyle-Shapiro write that organisations and managers must be aware that the social context shapes individual work relationships

Serving the cause when my organization does not: a self‐affirmation model of employees’ compensatory responses to ideological contract breach

Transactional and relational contract breach occur when organizations fail to deliver on promised personal benefits for employees and are associated with negative behaviors reciprocating such mistreatment. However, recent research suggests that ideological contract breach, a unique form of contract breach, may yield constructive behaviors because it is not organizations’ direct personal mistreatment of employees, but organizations’ abandonment of a valued cause to benefit a third party. Such an interesting prediction goes beyond the dominant social-exchange framework, which mainly forecasts destructive responses to breach. In this research, we develop a novel self-affirmation model to explain how ideological contract breach results in counterintuitive positive outcomes. In a hospital field study among medical professionals (N = 362) and their supervisors (N = 129), we found that ideological contract breach induces employees’ rumination about the breach, which in turn prompts them to self-affirm core values at work. This self-affirmation eventually spurs proactive serving behavior and self-improvement behavior to compensate for the breached ideology. Professional identification enhances this self-affirmation process

Unraveling disruptions: how employees pick up signals of change

Psychological contracts reside in the eye of the beholder and capture the employee-employer exchange relationship. It is a dynamic relationship as employees deliberately manage and change their psychological contract over time. Triggers seem to be the drivers underpinning this dynamism. Yet little is known about how these triggers operate and affect the psychological contract. To address this, we explore triggers and their impact using a 6-week daily diary study (N = 117). We found a linear chain of positive relationships from initial triggers to connectedness of past triggers, to the experience of negative emotions, to the expected reoccurrence of the initial trigger, ultimately disrupting the psychological contract. The findings revealed the dynamic effect of triggers on the employment relationship, not only by exposing the underlying micro-processes, but also by revealing that the impact of triggers can linger for approximately 11 days before leveling off. These findings suggest that the psychological contract may fluctuate on a daily basis due to the influence of triggers. The theoretical implications for understanding the dynamic nature of the psychological contract are discussed in relation to the disruptive role of triggers

The employee–organization relationship and organizational citizenship behavior

Drawing upon social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity, we review the employee–organization relationship (EOR). A number of EOR frameworks share common theoretical ground yet have developed independently: psychological contracts, perceived organizational support, employment relationship, social and economic exchange, and idiosyncratic deals. We examine the empirical evidence linking each of the frameworks to employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Relationships based on minimal investment (quasi-spot contracts and transactional psychological contracts) and psychological contract breach are negatively related to OCB. Economic exchange is unrelated to OCB. Relationships that demonstrate investment, support, fulfillment of obligations, and granting of idiosyncratic deals are positively related to OCB because they signal a trusting and benefit conferring relationship. We outline challenges and future research directions that address the “value addedness” of the EOR frameworks