| Psychological contract has attracted enormous attention in management research and practice. When a new employee joined a new organization, he would sign a written contract with his employer. At the same time, he will also form an implicit expectation about his job and the company, which is named psychological contract in many research literatures. It means that to employees' perceptions of what they owe to their employers and what their employers owe to them. Psychological contract is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary employment relationships. It has great effects on the job satisfaction and work behaviors of employees. With the rapid development and dynamic changes in most Chinese organizations, the possibility of psychological contract breach has increased in recent years. Psychological contract breach will lead to various negative work behaviors such as low citizenship behavior, low job satisfaction and performance and increasing of turnover. All of these reasons make the good management of psychological contract an important field for researchers and managers.Trust is a concept that closely related to psychological contract. Trust is the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party, which is based on the positive expectation that the other party will perform a particular action important to the trustor. Prior research has considered trust as the antecedent or consequence variable of psychological contract breach. According to the bounded-rationality model of Simon, the psychological contract of employees will never be complete. The incompleteness of psychological contract will lead the dynamic development of interaction between trust and psychological contract.We tried to explore the dynamic development process of psychological contract and trust, which will provide a new perspective to manage psychological contract and trust for managers. Based on the theory of decision making and learning, this study systematically examined the interaction of trust and the process of psychological contract fonnation, breach and compensation in Chinese organizations by structured interview, questionnaire, longitudinal survey and experiment. With the results confirmed in these researches, a dynamic development model of psychological contract and trust has been proposed. Suggestions for developing good psychological contracts between organization and employees also have been discussed. The study was developed in five separated parts as following:(1) The first study has focused on the formation and breach of psychologicalcontract in Chinese organizations. We tried to explore the formation and development of psychological contract, and general outcomes of psychological contract breach and violation with structured interview method. Finally, a framework of development process of psychological contract was proposed.(2) The second part is to develop and confirm a psychological contract structure model of Chinese employees. In this part, firstly, an open questionnaire survey of 200 graduates was conducted to develop the questionnaire of psychological contract. Then, we modified the questionnaire by exploratory factor analysis with data from a pre-test of 645 graduates. Finally, we developed a psychological contract structure model with two levels and two dimensions by confirmatory factor analysis. The results of this study provide sound data and details for the following research.(3) The third part is about the mechanism of psychological contract formation and trust. We examined the relationships between psychological contract, organizational trust, intentions to remain, and other variables with questionnaire survey. The results showed that there is high correlation and a variety of interactions between these variables in this part. Specifically, employees' trust in their employers and the certainty of commitment influenced the employees' perceptions of employer obligations, and perceived employee obligations to their employers depend on the perceptions of employer obligations deeply. However, due to the restrictions of questionnaire research, the causal relationship and dynamic development between these variables was very hard to be demonstrated in this part. Therefore, the fourth and fifth parts were developed to explore the dynamic relations.(4) The fourth research focused on the effect mechanism of psychological contract breach and trust. In this part, we examined the relationships between psychological contract fulfillment or breach and employee behaviors with the data from a longitudinal survey of 60 newly hired employees. The results showed that psychological contract breach had a negative impact on employees' attitudes and behavior. Further, initial trust in one's employer at the time of hire moderated the relationship between psychological contract breach and the negative outcomes directly or indirectly.(5) The final part is about the psychological contract compensation. In order to make up the insufficiency of sample in longitudinal survey, we examined the role of trust in psychological contract breach and repair by repeated measure experiment design. 139 students took part in the experiment. The results showed that if decision-makers attributed psychological contract breach to ability, trust was moreeasily repaired than attributed to benevolence. Meanwhile, the value of individuals moderated the relationship between the type of psychological contract breach and the extent of trust repaired.With the results of the five above researches, we concluded that there was an interactive development process between psychological contract and trust. Trust played an irreplaceable and important role in the development process of psychological contract. The results of this study revealed that researchers should pay more attention to the interaction development process of psychological contract and trust, and managers should improve the organizational trust, and promote the construction and maintenance of good psychological contract. |
