An Empirical Research On The Influence Of Psychological Contract Breach On Union Commitment

Psychological contract has been taken as an important concept in the organizational behavior research fields. According to the existing research, psychological contract breach can lead to the changes of employees' work attitudes and behaviors. The relation between psychological contract breach and individual union attitudes has been concerned recently. While in China, union is seen as the appendage of the corporation and it can't work effectively to protect employees' rights from infringement, which make the union-related research pointless. However, with the pour of private and foreign corporations in Chinese market and the continuously-growing contradiction and conflict between labor and capital, the rights protection function of China's trade union is being stressed, thus the study about union-related problems such as the relationship between psychological contract breach and union commitment becomes more and more important and meaningful.Based on the study from home and abroad, We explore the influencing mechanism of psychological contract breach to union commitment. We test the model through a sample of 305 employees from non-public enterprises in Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province. The statistical analysis of the data indicate the several findings:(1)Psychological contract breach has a positive effect on union commitment, i.e., the stronger psychological contract breach employees felt, the higher union commitment employees will express.(2)Different from the foreigners' findings, organization cynicism plays as a partial mediation in the relationship between psychological contract breach and union commitment, which means the effect of psychological contract breach to union commitment is partly transferred by organizational cynicism.(3)Perceived union instrumentality can moderate the relationship between organizational cynicism and union commitment. The higher the perceived union instrumentality is, the stronger the relation will be, while the lower the perceived union instrumentality is, the weaker the relation will be. These conclusions not only have great realistic guiding significance to the further construction of unions in our country construction, can also help companies to deal with the psychological contract between employees and enterprises and to improve the employment relation between the staff and the enterprises.This study also offers some theoretical basis and practical guidance. On the one hand, although foreign research about the relation between psychological contract breach and union commitment is already underway, it is rarely studied under the background of China. Through reviewing study abroad and applying the existing mature theory to China's non-state-owned enterprise research, we test the applicability and further provide a new perspective for the study of the relation between psychological contract breach and union commitment; on the other hand, the empirical study also suggests that many parts of the union rights protection function still remain to be improved and provides some advices for better employment relations.