An Empirical Study On The Construct Dimensions Of Managers' Psychological Contracts In China

Psychological contracts (PC) are defined as a set of individuals' beliefs and perceptions regarding the mutual obligations to each other held by the two parties in the employment relation, the organization and employees, which may not necessarily be perceived by the organization agents, and it emerges based on the understanding organizational policies, behaviors, culture and the perception of the promises made by all levels of agents in the organization. Although psychological contract has existed for a long time, it's only in the past twenty years that it has emerged as a serious topic for conceptual and empirical analysis, especially in the past ten years it gained more and more attentions from the theoretic and enterprises and now has become a focus in human resource management.This article focus on the construct dimensions of manager's PC in China. Based on the literature researching, we propose the theoretic model of four dimensions of the managers'PC. Then, in order to explore the manager's PC, we carry out the survey to 408 managers with the self-developing questionnaire. Through the exploratory factor analysis at one sample and the confirmatory factor analysis at another sample, we got the conclusion. The finding shows: it more reasonable for managers of China to have a four construct dimensions PC, especially during this transition times. Manager's PC consists of transactional contract,developmental contract,emotional contract and managerial contract , that is to say, the organizational obligation and the managers obligation in the manager's PC both have four dimensions: transactional,developmental,emotional and managerial. The findings in this article have a good significance, especially for HRM practices in the enterprises. During the course of HRM, organization must pay more attention to the manager's PC, manages the manager's PC. It's necessary for organization to try to understand the content of manager's PC, and how to cultivate and maintain it, so that we can carry out the various and flexible measures correspondingly. The only purpose why we do this is that we want to let the invisible PC become a powerful tool to attract,motivate and attain the managers. Finally, in the end of the article we summarize the limits of the research and the future direction in the field of PC.