An examination of the linkages between personality, leader-member exchange, and experienced violation of the psychological contract

While previous research has focused mainly on relationships between various personality variables and either leader-member exchange or psychological contract violation, none has yet to examine how these constructs are linked. A model of these proposed relationships is developed based on theory drawn from literature in the areas of social psychology, leader-member exchange, and psychological contracts. The present research used structural equation modeling to examine the strength of the relationship between the personality variables of negative affect, positive affect, self-monitoring, and trait cynicism with respect to leader-member exchange and perceptions of psychological contract violation. Positive affect and negative affect were found to significantly relate to both LMX and the perception of psychological contract violation. Trait cynicism was not significantly related to LMX and only weakly related to perceptions of psychological contract violation. It was hypothesized that LMX would partially mediate the relationships between the individual personality factors and perceptions of psychological contract violation; however, the data did not support this hypothesis. While self-monitoring was hypothesized to moderate the relationship of positive affect, negative affect, and trait cynicism with LMX, the moderating effect was found to be significant only for the negative affect/LMX relationship.