| Social exchange theorists have alluded to employment as the trade of effort and loyalty for tangible benefits and social rewards. Organization and employees both should understand their own responsibilities and benefits, which are always specified by economical contract. But economical contract takes effects on behaviors of both organization and employees only by means of cognition; so psychological contract becomes the highlighting topic of management psychological research.Based upon previous research on psychological contract, work values and attribution theory, this study examined the impact of psychological contract breaches on employees' work attitude and organizational citizenship behavior.Firstly, a questionnaire of employee psychological contract was developed on the base of Rousseau and Robbinson's study and our preliminary interviews with employees working with manufactures. The questionnaire was then administered to 246 subjects sampled from companies in 7 cities. The results suggested that,1. On the organization side, the psychological contract consisted of four components—transactional contract, relational contract, work characteristic contract and personal development contract.2. Psychological contract breaches resulted in employees' negative attitude and behavior. Specifically, relational contract breaches resulted in decreased levels of job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment, increased levels of cynicism and turnover intention, and decreased organizational citizenship behaviors; transactional contract breaches resulted in increased level of cynicism; work characteristic contract breaches resulted in decreased active behavior; personal developmental contract breaches resulted in increased level of turnover intention.3. Work values influenced psychological contract breaches, work attitude and organizational citizenship behavior directly. Individualism mediated the effectsthat psychological contract breaches had on job satisfaction, specifically, whether organization fulfilled its responsibilities well or not, employees who got higher score on individualism have higher level of job satisfaction than those who got lower score; when organizational responsibilities were fulfilled in correspondence with employees' expectations, there was no significant difference in the levels of job satisfaction between employees who got higher score on individualism and those who got lower score. Collectivism didn't mediate the effects that psychological contract breaches had on work attitude and organizational citizenship behavior.4. Employees often attributed psychological contract breach to the inner factors of the organization, such as managerial rules and operational fact, managers' diathesis and preference, enterprise's ownership and trade characteristic. We also confirmed the Mediating effects of attribution on the relationship between psychological contract breaches and turnover intention. Specifically, the level of turnover intention was lower when employees attributed psychological contract breaches to outer factors than to inner and stable factors. |
