Content area
Full Text
Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements. Denise M. Rousseau. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 242 pp. $44.00, cloth; $21.00, paper.
Many hundreds of scholarly books are published in the fields that compose organizational science every year, yet only a handful make it onto our bookshelves, and only a miniscule proportion of these show up on required reading lists for our doctoral students. What is it that makes those few books more valuable? Rarely is it that they provide a "new idea," certainly it is not that they put familiar concepts in boxes linked by arrows, nor do they get there by concluding that people should be more thoughtful in their organizational dealings. More often, books become valuable because they provide us with clarity at a key moment in a scholarly debate.
Even better is a book that can make us proud of our intellectual corner by lucidly explaining matters. Rousseau's book does this and, therefore, has as fair a chance as I have seen to become a required-reading classic. It is not just me that thinks so: this book received the 1996 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management.
In this book, Rousseau analyzes and elaborates on the psychological contract-a popular metaphor used to describe an employee's relationship with his or her organization. Like all good metaphors, this one has provided insights into how employees' informal expectations are established and has helped direct attention to important organizational issues. Nevertheless, it is imperfect. After all, one "side" to the agreement is a fictional person (the organization), and so it has been unclear who (among the many) could commit it to deals with employees, or even whether "it" recognizes that it has made certain deals with employees....