A Study On The Psychological Contract Of College Foreign Teachers

With the deepening development of educational internationalization in China, a growing number of foreign teachers come to work in China. However, language barriers, cultural differences and lack of understanding brought a lot of management obstacles to the school managers who are in charge of those foreign teachers. These obstacles are likely to cause many problems such as low utilization rate of foreign intellectual resources, and frequent turnover. "Psychological contract" is now serving as a popular construct characterizing the employment relationship in industrial organizational psychology in the West. Researchers believe that the psychological contract impacts many employment outcomes as an internal driving force. Therefore, this study aims to apply the psychological contract theory created by Western scholars to the management of foreign teachers through questionnaires and interviews to explore the current psychological contract status of college foreign teachers, as well as its impact on perceived organizational support, organizational commitment, job satisfaction and performance. Also this is the first trial to use Dr. D.M. Rousseau's Psychological Contract Inventory (2008) with a sample of western people in China.The results show that the teacher obligations of foreign teachers'psychological contract are more balanced-oriented, while the college obligations have shown almost equal of three dimensions. Foreign teachers' relational obligations are positively correlated to contract fulfillment and have a positive impact on perceived organizational support, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. College's relational obligations are positively correlated to the teachers' psychological contract fulfillment; while college's transactional obligations are positively correlated to the contract breach. The psychological contract breach has a negative impact on perceived organizational support and job satisfaction. The college obligations fulfillment has a positive impact on perceived organizational support. These study results have generally confirmed most of the hypothesis and will serve as a theoretical support and empirical evidence to the psychological contract management of foreign teachers for Chinese colleges.