Working in Imbalance: How Employees Revise Their Psychological Contracts in a Post-Breach Environment

Abstract

In the post-violation model of the psychological contract, employees who have experienced violation engage in a variety of coping strategies and, more often than not, form a new psychological contract and continue to work for their employer. Our study applies this theoretical model to actual employees’ descriptions of how they deal with psychological contract violation and develop new psychological contracts. We collected interview data from 27 employees at a large manufacturing organization in which dramatic, irreversible company-wide change not only violated employees’ psychological contracts but also provided few obvious opportunities to repair them. Through template analysis of interview transcripts, we chronicle employees’ coping processes, inventory their new psychological contracts, and assess the quality of their employment relationships. We found that some employees effected extensive changes to their psychological contracts, some engaged in an unexpectedly long process of adjustment, and some compromised their self-interest to uphold their pre-violation psychological contracts. Our findings generally map to the post-violation model, but with important refinements that accentuate employees’ role in recreating their psychological contracts, the durability of their psychological contracts, and the role of the psychological contract as a coping mechanism.