Research On The Formation Mechanism Of The Psychological Contract Equilibrium In Gig Economy

Fueled by the development of the Internet and the mobile technology,as well as people’s changing concepts of work,the Internet-based gig economy has become increasingly common as a new economic model.Compared with traditional employment relationships,the relationship between gig workers and intermediary platforms is more flexible and less restrictive.However,the existing organizational behavior researches have not paid much attention to the gig work relationship or the psychological contract between gig workers and intermediary platforms,and the psychological contract researches have not covered the scenario of gig work.Therefore,the thesis analyzes the content,the types and the influencing factors of the psychological contract between gig workers and intermediary platforms,and explores the formation mechanism of the equilibrium state of the psychological contract,with the aim to provide suggestions to establish a benign relationship between gig workers and intermediary platforms.The author takes Didi Chuxing,a Chinese online car hailing company as the research object,and collects data by interviewing platform staffs and online car-hailing drivers and observing the management practice.The author then processes the data using three level coding based on the grounded theory and tries to construct a formation mechanism model of the equilibrium state of the psychological contract.Based on the research results,the author provides several suggestions for intermediary platforms,gig workers and industry supervisors.The main conclusions of this thesis are:(1)The content of the psychological contract includes organizational inducement and individual contributions,both of which include obligation content and expectation content.(2)Psychological contracts can be divided into different types according to different inducement and contribution levels,but the high inducement-low contribution platform psychological contract and the low inducement-high contribution driver psychological contract have not been found in the research.(3)The imbalance of the psychological contract can lead to its rupture and the response of the platform and the drivers to the rupture will lead to changes of the psychological contract.Through contribution increase,inducement increase,and inducement reduction,the two parties of the psychological contract may reach a short-term or long-term equilibrium of the contract again.The main contributions of this thesis are:(1)enriching the research on the psychological contract by exploring the characteristics of the psychological contract between the intermediary platforms and the gig workers in the gig economy;(2)overcoming the limitation of the previous individual-perspective researches and focusing on the psychological contract from the perspectives of both the intermediary platforms and the gig workers;(3)exploring the dynamic path for intermediary platforms and gig workers to achieve equilibrium state and providing suggestions to form a benign relationship through psychological contract.