Structure And Related Factors Of Employees' Psychological Contract

Employee psychological contract refers to the mutual obligation perceived by employees among the reciprocal relationships of employees and organization. It includes two facets: Organization obligations to employees and Employee obligations to organization. Compared to economic contract, psychological contract is also a dominant factor in determining the attitude and obligation of employees towards organization although most of the content of psychological contract are ambiguous and implicit. Psychological contract, therefore, is one of the important research topics in the fields of human resource management and organizational behavior.This study aims at several aspects: exploring the structure and inner relationships of employee psychological contract in Chinese business organizations; understanding the cognitive gap between the content of psychological contract from the perspectives of employees and organizations, as well as the influences of this cognitive gap to employee obligations and attitudes; investigating the dynamic process of psychological contract through longitudinal study; understanding the influences of the violation of psychological contract to employees' obligations and attitudes. Finally, we try to summarize the principles and rules from these studies and establish some measures in order to construct positive psychological contract. We applied these measures as intervention in the field study and found some positive results.In the study of the structure of psychological contract, based on existing studies, the author proposed a three-dimension structure model and constructed a questionnaire of psychological contract. Data were collected from 796 employees all over the country. Using confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and regression analysis, the author explored the structure of the psychological contract and analyzed inner relations. The results indicated that: 1) It is more appropriate to describe the psychological contract of Chinese employees with three-dimension model, which suggests that in the two facets of ''employee obligation" and "organization obligation", both include three dimensions: normal obligation, developmental obligation, and interpersonal obligation; 2) In the inner relations of psychological contract, the influence of "organization obligation" to "employee obligation" is not a parallel corresponding relation, rather, it is an reciprocal interaction relation. The most impacting force comes from the interpersonal obligation and normal obligation of organization obligation to employee.In the study of cognitive gap of psychological contract, investigation was made about the differences of the perception to "organization obligation" from the perspectives of organizations and employees respectively. Data were collected from 36 middle level managers in 15 companies. Subjects were asked to rate the organization obligation to employees from a perspective of organization, and the corresponding 186 employees were asked to rate the organization obligation to employees from a perspective of employees. The results demonstrated that: 1) For the content of psychological contract, there exists a big difference of understanding between organization perspective and employee perspective; 2) The cognitive gap greatly influences the employee obligation to the organization; 3) The gap significantly influences job-related attitudes of employees; 4) The different facets of the gap have different impact towards employees' behaviorsand attitudes.In the study of psychological contract violation, a longitudinal study examined the change of the content of psychological contract from 46 new employees within a year from their joining the company. The results suggests that: 1) The sense of psychological contract violation negatively influences employee obligation to organization and the job-related attitudes; 2) the different aspects of the violation of psychological contract have different influences.In the intervention study,5 measures were proposed based on the previous studi...