| In a knowledge-driven economy, functional employee-organization relationships are an increasingly important source of wealth and value creation for both individual employees and their organizations. When adequately built and maintained, relationships between employees and organizations provide the basis for flexibility in dealing with dynamic change, while allowing for the stability required for improved performance. A great deal of research has been conducted on the exchange relationship between the employee and the organization during the last 15 years. Although most studies have focused almost exclusively on a simple level of analysis, typically the individual or the organizational level, no single level can account for the complexity of the phenomena involved in the employee-organization relationship. Ultimately, the greatest value appears to be in integrating these two perspectives enabling a more integrated understanding of the employment relationship.; This dissertation provides alternative approaches and diverse methodologies to explicitly address critical linkages operating at different levels in the employee-organization relationship. In particular, the essays comprising this dissertation address the following multilevel issues: (1) whether agreement in beliefs exists between the two parties to a social exchange and how it is captured in the employee-organization relationship, (2) the role of social network interactions among employees in shaping their individual beliefs regarding the employment exchange, and (3) the emergence of normative contracts expressing employees' shared beliefs within a workunit.; The first essay, titled "Mutuality and reciprocity in the psychological contracts of employees and employers," assessed the joint perceptions of the employee and employer to examine mutuality and reciprocity in the employment relationship. The second essay, titled "Psychological contracts and the informal social structure of organizations: Systemic and local effects ," adopts a social network perspective to examine the link between the informal social structure of the organization and employees' psychological contract beliefs. Finally, the third essay, titled "Institutional entrepreneurship and the transformation of normative contracts in professional employment contexts," adopts a meso-organizational perspective to investigate change in the normative contract of professional employees. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
