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Research on psychological contracts has not been clear on why psychological contract breach (PCB) impacts psychological contract violation (PCV). While a few studies have examined individual mediators, no integrated view of the mechanisms responsible has been undertaken. In addition, the emotions associated with PCB have been underexplored to date and studies have over-relied on a PCV measure that focuses primarily on intense emotions like anger and betrayal. Therefore, this study examines multiple mediators of the PCB-PCV relationship: mistrust, distributive injustice, perceived lack of organizational support, and self-identity threat. Using a longitudinal design and a random sample of 148 university alumni, the results show that only mistrust is a significant mediator of the PCB-PCV relationship. The results also show that the primary emotion associated with PCB is sadness, not anger, and that both of these emotions decrease over time. These findings highlight the importance of repairing trust and reducing feelings of sadness following PCB in order to diminish its negative consequences.
Keywords: Psychological contract breach, psychological contract violation, mistrust, self-identity threat, emotions
Psychological contracts have been an important area of research over the past 30 years with numerous empirical and theoretical papers published on the topic (e.g., Rousseau, 1989; Rousseau, 1995; Morrison and Robinson, 1997; Conway and Briner, 2005). A psychological contract consists of individual beliefs, shaped by the organization, regarding terms of an exchange agreement between individuals and their organizations (Rousseau, 1995). In 1997, Morrison and Robinson made an important distinction between psychological contract breach (PCB), which is the cognition that one's organization has failed to meet one or more of its obligations, and psychological contract violation (PCV), which is the emotional and affective, state that may follow awareness of the unfulfilled obligation.
Research has shown that PCB is prevalent within organizations (Robinson and Rousseau, 1994; O'Leary-Kelly e,t al., 2014) and that its occurrence results in a variety of negative attitudes and behaviors, such as decreased job satisfaction (Tekleab and Taylor, 2003), performance (Turnley e,t al., 2003), and organizational commitment (Lester e,t al., 2002). A meta-analysis (Zhao et al., 2007) found that PCV mediates the effects of PCB on these employee attitudes and behaviors. While researchers argue that PCB is "generally assumed to increase feelings of violation" (Zhao et al., 2007: 650), very few...