THE MODERATING IMPACTS OF AGE AND LOCUS OF CONTROL ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT BREACH-OUTCOMES RELATIONSHIPS: A VIETNAM-JAPAN COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The current study examines the moderating impacts of age and locus of control on the relationships between psychological contract breach and in-role job performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and intention to quit. Data were collected from both Vietnam and Japan to enable a comparative study. Vietnamese data were collected from MBA students while Japanese data were collected from employees at several small and medium sized companies. The final data sets consist of 364 observations for Vietnamese sample and 342 observations for Japanese sample. The results confirm the role of psychological contract breach as a predictor of workplace outcomes for both data sets. Age did not moderate the relationship between breach and intention to quit for Japanese data. For Vietnamese data, age moderated the relationship in that young employees are more likely to quit when experience psychological contract breach but such pattern decreases with age. Moreover, locus of control (LOC) moderated the relationship between breach and all three outcome variables in the predicted direction. The results suggest that Vietnamese company need to have policies to retain young employees who have 2-5 years of experience and pay more attention on employees’ personality at various stages of employment.Keywords: Psychological Contract Breach; Moderating Impact; Locus of Control; ComparativeStudy; Workplace Outcomes; Vietnam; Japan.