A stress model of psychological contract violation among ethnic minority employees.

Abstract

Integrating the transactional theory of stress and coping and research on discrimination perception/attribution, we propose a stress model of psychological contract (PC) violation among ethnic minority employees. We argue that ethnic minority employees tend to appraise PC violation as a threat and attribute it to personal ethnic discrimination (as well as low organizational trustworthiness), which in turn leads ethnic minority employees to engage in fear-driven silence as a form of emotion-based withdrawal coping. We conducted two survey studies (Studies 1 and 2), an experimental study (Study 3), and a supplementary meta-analysis of the three studies. We found support for our model. Ethnic minority employees' perception of personal ethnic discrimination, rather than their perception of low organizational trustworthiness, translated PC violation to fear-driven silence. Our result patterns remained the same when we controlled for neuroticism and social desirability. By delineating ethnic minorities' appraisal/attribution of and coping with PC violation, the current research advances the literatures on both PC and ethnic discrimination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).