Editorial: Unravelling the Role of Time in Psychological Contract Processes

Frontiers in Psychology

Yannick Griep¹ 

关键词: psychological contract;    time;    dynamics;    violation feelings;    psychological contract breach;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00813

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The psychological contract (PC) is considered a critical construct in organizational behavior. Upon organizational entry individuals form a PC containing beliefs about the reciprocal obligations between themselves and their employer (Rousseau, 1989, 2001). The PC is self-regulatory and influences how the employee perceives and interprets past, present, and future interactions with the employer. When employees perceive that their employer has failed to fulfill its obligations (i.e., PC breach) they may develop negative affective reactions (e.g., violation feelings; Morrison and Robinson, 1997), negative attitudes, and negative behaviors (for meta-analyses see Zhao et al., 2007; Bal et al., 2008). While the existing PC literature offers a solid theoretical foundation to understand the relationship between perceptions of PC breach, violation feelings, and employee reactions, most PC research has examined relationships in a static, or contemporaneous, manner and has overlooked the temporal context in which PC breach and employee reactions are interrelated and potentially reinforcing to each other over time (for a general critique see Mitchell and James, 2001). The contemporaneous study of PC breach and employee reactions is problematic because it ignores temporal context and the adjustments that employees make to their attitudes and behaviors over time. As such, the current literature fails to acknowledge that the PC is a dynamic construct that is formed, maintained, disrupted, and repaired over time (e.g., Schalk and Roe, 2007; Tomprou et al., 2015; Hansen and Griep, 2016), and that relationships between PC breach and employee reactions that exist at one point in time may not necessarily exist, or vary in strength, at another point in time (see Hansen and Griep, 2016; Griep and Vantilborgh, 2018). This Research Topic is devoted to advancing the PC field by exploring valuable knowledge concerning the role of time in PC processes. In the following, we lay out some critical areas of inquiry in understanding the role of time, and highlight how the innovative set of papers in this Research Topic illustrate exciting future research directions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY