Understanding the process through which breaches of the psychological contract influence feelings of psychological contract violation: An analysis incorporating causal, responsibility, and blame attribution

Employees' psychological contracts are receiving increased attention in the organizational literature, although our understanding of the relationship between perceived breaches of the contract and feelings of anger and other negative emotions associated with psychological contract violation remains limited. The present study sought to explain the development of feelings of psychological contract violation through the attributions employees make for the breaches they perceive. The entailment model, borrowed from the marital satisfaction literature, was used as the framework for understanding the impact of causal, responsibility and blame attributions on psychological contract violation. A secondary goal of this study was to explore the relationship between psychological contract violation, organizational cynicism, organizational citizenship behaviors and workplace deviance behaviors, to determine whether it makes sense to consider psychological contract violation, not psychological contract breach, as the more proximal influence on those attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.;Causal, responsibility and blame attributions each separately explained significant amounts of the variance in psychological contract violation. In addition, responsibility attributions explained additional variance beyond that accounted for by causal attributions. In contrast to a full entailment view of attributions, blame attributions were not able to account for additional variance in psychological contract violation beyond that accounted for by causal and responsibility attributions. Another test of the full entailment model, using structural equation modeling, indicated that the model had mediocre fit. Despite this mediocre fit, the paths from causal to responsibility attributions, responsibility to blame attributions and blame attributions to contract violation, were all large, indicating support for the entailment model.;In the secondary analyses involving psychological contract violation, the results indicated that psychological contract violation added to the prediction of organizational citizenship behaviors, workplace deviance behaviors and organizational cynicism, beyond the predictive power of psychological contract breach. In fact, psychological contract violation fully mediated the relationship between psychological contract breach and most of the outcomes. Therefore, the majority of prior studies that have looked only at the relationship between psychological contract breach and organizational outcomes have ignored an important relationship between psychological contract violation and these same outcomes.