Psychological Contract Breaches, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, and Identification Mechanisms: Insights from the perspective of general employees and ethnic minority employees

SUMMARY

Psychological contract breaches, organizational citizenship behavior, and identification mechanisms: Insights from the perspective of general and ethnic minority employees.

PhD researcher: Pinar Tufan

Supervisors: Professor Karel De Witte and Professor Hein Wendt

A psychological contract (PC) framework may offer powerful insights into contemporary employment relationships (Guest & Conway, 2003). An additional value comes from studying multiple types of PCs with their unique qualities (Montes & Irving, 2008). The main research goal of this dissertation is to advance insight into the contribution of multiple types of PC breaches to understanding organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) from the perspective of general and ethnic minority employees.

This dissertation starts with Rousseau’s (1995) typology of PCs. It investigates how distinctly transactional, relational, and balanced PC breaches are related to OCB. For further insights, it examines the mediating role of organizational identification for the effects of transactional, relational, and balanced PC breaches on OCB. It tests the proposed mediation for employees in general, and then for employees of ethnic minority. Notably, this is the first research, which applies multiple types of PC breaches to minority employees (i.e., ethnic minorities). Given that there is an increasing interest for new and unique PCs for specific employees (Cunningham, Barbee, & Mandal, 2009; Rousseau, 2004), this dissertation focuses also on a diversity-related PC breach for ethnic minority employees. It pays particular attention to the incremental value of studying a diversity-related PC breach along with transactional, relational, and balanced PC breaches in explaining ethnic minority employees’ organizational identification and hence OCB. Finally, to explain the sole effect of a diversity-related PC breach on OCB, this dissertation develops and tests a moderated mediation model, in which intergroup anxiety acts as a mediator and acculturation as a moderator.

In all, the current PhD with three empirical studies using different designs (i.e., cross- sectional and time-lagged), and two different samples enables us to demonstrate how transactional, relational, balanced, and diversity-related PC breaches predict reduced OCB. It devotes special emphasis to identification mechanisms as social identity theory and social exchange theory in order to understand contemporary employment relationships (He & Brown, 2013; Van Knippenberg & Sleebos, 2006). The implications for both theory and practice are discussed and important directions are highlighted for moving the field forward.