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1. Introduction
Organisations are increasingly concerned about intentions of their employees to quit their jobs and look for alternate job opportunities. This is because these employees invest a lot of their time and energy ruminating and looking for new employment opportunities, rather than focussing on their current job responsibilities (Jiang et al., 2019; Mai et al., 2016; Park et al., 2016). Moreover, when such intentions materialise into actual employee turnover, substantial organisational costs are incurred to recruit, train and socialise new employees to replace them (Tews et al., 2013). Besides this, intentions to leave an organisation are also detrimental to employees' career if such intentions are revealed before they actually leave (Khatri et al., 2001; Mano-Negrin and Tzafrir, 2004). Moreover, leaving a place where they have worked for many years also provokes negative emotions (Dowden and Tellier, 2004; Guo et al., 2019).
Considering these challenges, it is imperative to understand what spurs employees' turnover intentions. To answer this question, extant research has identified a plethora of factors involved, such as lack of organisational rewards (Nazir et al., 2016), limited organisational and supervisory support (Gillet et al., 2013; Tuzun and Kalemci, 2012; Park et al., 2016), lack of autonomy (Dysvik and Kuvaas, 2013) and organisational change (Rafferty and Restubog, 2017). A common theme of these studies is that adverse treatment by the organisation and/or its members heightens turnover intentions among employees (Lawong et al., 2018; Wiltshire et al., 2014). Following this line of research, our study aims to examine one specific source of frustration which employees may encounter at work, namely psychological contract violation (PCV). Specifically, we argue that suffering from perceived violations can cause employees to become frustrated with their job situation to the extent that they develop the intention to leave (Arshad, 2016; Cheung et al., 2017; Morrison and Robinson, 1997; Rousseau, 1995).
In doing so, we specifically follow Morrison and Robinson's (1997) conceptualisation of PCV as a primarily affective state where employees develop strong emotional responses to broken organisational promises. It is different from psychological contract breach (PCB), which only covers the cognitive awareness of employees of their employers' failures to meet obligations (Cassar and Briner, 2011; Morrison and Robinson, 1997)....