Team Members' Psychological Contract And Team Performance:the Role Of Shared Leadership

Introduction-The study that helps organization discover their employee's perception and behavior related to a psychological contract(D.M.Rousseau 1989;Coyle-Shapiro and Parzefall 2008).Psychological contracts are associated with beliefs of obligation that employees have based upon the exchange agreement between themselves and their foremen(Robinson,Kraatz and Rousseau 1994;D.M.Rousseau 1989).At the mean time,teamwork has increasingly become the great interest of scholars and researchers for its effectiveness in work performance.Many organizations adopt teamwork as a drive to achieve specific organizational goals.Also,leadership behavior such as shared or distributed leadership is considered as the critical factor which could achieve the effectiveness of teams.Also,shared leadership is conceptualized as a more relational process,a shared or distributed phenomenon occurring at different levels and depend on social interactions and networks of influence(Conger and Pearce 2003).Besides,psychological contract is used to explain the relationship between organizations and employees while shared leadership is associated with the outcome of group performance and improve team's capacity.Despite the previous findings,the formation of the psychological contract remains theoretically underdeveloped and receive the limited empirical attention which induces more call for research work.Also,the shift in organizational leadership has become the focus of many empirical kinds of literature that raised the question what kind of leadership will be appropriate in new team based environment.Purpose-This research is to provide a new proposed model framework to test the existing concepts of psychological contract and shared leadership by connecting these variables and the consequence of their effects.First,this study focuses on the psychological contract of team's members.The types of thepsychological contract are investigated as well as team performance.Second,within group process,shared leadership is also tested to find the mediating effect between psychological contract and team performance.Methodology-This research employed a quantitative approach to construct and conduct the survey.With the help of cross-sectional design,38 knowledgeintensive teams from 4 high-tech companies in Shenzhen,China were questioned with the survey.Results-This study suggests that the content of psychological contract among the teams contains both relational and transactional elements and that these two contracts differ very much from each other.Analyses show that both team performance and shared leadership are positively related to the team members' relational psychological contract.However,team members' transactional psychological contract was not supported in any positive relationship between the two variables.The model also confirms the positive correlation between shared leadership and team performance.Finally,shared leadership was found to mediate the relationship between team members' relational psychological contract and team performance while team members' transactional psychological contract did not.Contribution-This research theoretically contributes to uniting three areas of research that are not previously researched together;psychological contract,shared leadership,and team performance.It also contributes to extending the effect of psychological contract to team context by identifying the psychological contract as an influenced factor connecting to team members' behavior and outcome.Moreover,the team members' relational psychological contract is discovered to be the factor of inducing team member's interaction and behavior that increases team performance.Promises of intangible benefits such as job safety,job condition,and autonomy are more related to positive behavior such as shared leadership as in team context.The role of shared leadership helps theteam achieve more outcome by engaging team members into in-role and extrarole performance.