Psychological contracts : back to the future

Abstract

Work lives are marked by meetings, schedules, and deadlines, all influenced by the objective passing of ‘clock’ time (Bluedorn & Den- hardt, 1988). The dynamic aspects of time (e.g., duration, pattern, sequences) and timing of events shape employee attitudes and behaviors toward the organization (Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013; Shipp & Cole, 2015). Despite its ubiquitous nature, issues of time in the workplace, and the temporal nature of employment relationships specifically, remain sorely underresearched, creating a strong need for impactful research on psychological contracts as they are related to time. By acknowledging and incorporating the role of time in theory, we are able to explore the emergence of, or change in, the psychological contract and its antecedents/consequences, the stability (or lack thereof) of psychological contract breach reactions, the rate of change in psychological contract breach reactions over shortand long-term time-lags (e.g., minutes, hours, days, or weeks), and the duration of these effects (e.g., immediate, delayed, or lingering), in both design and analytic approach. Several chapters argued that the psychological contract is a dynamic construct which is formed, maintained, disrupted, and repaired over time (most often with reference to the phasebased model of psychological contracts by Rousseau, Hansen, & Tomprou, 2018 and the post-violation model by Tomprou, Rousseau, & Hansen, 2015). Moreover, some earlier psychological contract work (e.g., Rousseau & McLean Parks, 1993; Sels, Janssens, & Van den Brande, 2004) recognizes that ‘time’ can be conceptualized as an underlying property of the psychological contract as a whole. Nonetheless, we have limited empirical understanding of the psychological contract as a time-based process (for a few examples, see Conway & Briner, 2002; Griep & Vantilborgh, 2018a, 2018b; Ng, Feldman, & Lam, 2010; Solinger, Hofmans, Bal, & Jansen, 2016; for a general critique see Hansen & Griep, 2016).