Emergence in context: How team-client psychological contract fulfillment is associated with the emergence of team identification or team-member exchange.

Abstract

Psychological contracts have been theorized to occur at different levels of analysis and with different exchange parties. In this article, we develop the concept of team-client psychological contract fulfillment (team-client PCF) as a team-level social exchange indicator, reflecting the team members' perceptions of the degree of fulfillment of the commitments a client promised to a team. Using the multilevel group-process framework (Lang et al., 2019) and a sample of newly formed self-managed teams consisting of 838 observations, nested in 244 individuals, 56 teams, and in four waves of data, we tested the claim that team-client PCF may determine the type of collective states that emerge within the team. When team-client PCF is higher, it should create conditions for the emergence of team states related to team maintenance (i.e., team identification), whereas when team-client PCF is lower, it is more likely that teams develop states related to the regulation of team performance (i.e., team-member exchange [TMX]). Our results support our hypotheses. We discuss implications for both the psychological contract literature as well as the team dynamics literature (especially team dynamics of team identification and TMX). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).