Psychological Contracts from the Employer?s Perspective: Qualitative and Quantitative Studies
Darden, Tanja R
Citations
Abstract
Psychological contract literature has found that employees typically react with anger when faced with breach of their contracts (Robinson & Rousseau, 1994). However, the supervisor’s emotional reactions to evaluations of psychological contracts should also be examined because of the supervisor’s key role in overall employee performance evaluations (Ferris, Munyon, Basik, & Buckley, 2008). It is important to understand the complete process that supervisors undertake, which is likely not just a cognitive one as implied by psychological contracts and performance management literature. In this empirical essay, I use emotions and affect events theories as the foundations of supervisors’ emotional reactions to comparing the promised and delivered contributions from their employees. I then build on power-dependence theory to hypothesize about how these emotional reactions are influenced by the supervisor’s dependence on the employee’s contributions. I focus on a variety of emotions – satisfaction, pride in employees, gratitude, anger, disappointment, and jealousy as mediators and neglect and mentoring as employee-targeted outcomes. I aim to show that, because of their dependence on employees’ delivery of contributions and emotion regulation abilities, supervisors experience a variety of emotions – positive and negative – that lead to positive and negative employee-targeted outcomes.
