The Exploratory Study Of Psychological Contract Structure For Middle Managers In Enterprise

Psychological contract (PC) is defined as the invisible, informal subjective psychological agreements, which is about employees and organizations should be paid for each other in the employment relationship. Many western psychologists have researched on psychological contract during the past decades, and have made plenty of achievements. In recent years, the theory of psychological contract has been introduced into China, and some elementary mainland study began in our psychology section. However, few of the researches focus on the middle manager, not only overseas but also in China.Middle managers are the backbone of organization management, and shoulder the dual role of leaders and subordinates. To explore the psychological contract structure of the middle managers, and to analysis the duty of middle managers and organization, can inspire enthusiasm for middle manager and promote the development of organization.This article focus on the psychological construct dimensions of middle manager. Through literature analysis, interviews, open-ended questionnaire surveys, and expert evaluation, we proposed the psychological contract structure model, and pre-tested using self-compiled pre-test questionnaire. We revised the pre-test questionnaire into the formal test scale. Middle managers were randomly selected as the participants. After the reliability and validity testing, item analysis and exploratory factor analysis at one sample, the psychological contract structure model was explored and verified though confirmatory factor analysis at another sample.The finding shows:middle managers'psychological contract is divided into two part:organization's duty and middle managers'duty, and every part consists of three dimensions:guaranteed PC, developmental PC and relational PC. There is the significant predictive power of organization's duty to middle managers'duty. Demographic variables, such as age, working hours, education, gender and marital status, and sector categories had the significant influence on at least one dimension of PC.This study developed a set of questionnaire of middle managers' psychological contract, explored the middle managers'psychological contract structure model, gave some advices for Middle Management based on the dimensions of PC, and had a good significance, especially for HRM practices in the enterprises.