Manager Responses to Employee Dissent About Psychological Contract Breach

Abstract

Communication scholars have made significant headway toward understanding the upward dissent process, conceptualizing different types of upward dissent strategies and investigating the use of these strategies. However, scholars have hardly considered the dyadic process associated with upward dissent strategies and manager responses to these strategies, or how the nature of dissent may influence the dissent process. We describe the dissent process in relation to personal-advantage dissent. We focus on a specific trigger—psychological contract breach (PCB)— because this negative workplace event is regularly experienced among employees and employees are likely to express their dissatisfaction about PCB to their managers. We present a dyadic process model that explains how employee–manager interactions following an employee’s initial dissent about PCB evolve over time.