Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Management and Information Systems

First Advisor

Amanuel G. Tekleab

Abstract

Despite the fact that the literature on psychological contracts has flourished in the last 20 years (Rousseau, 2011; Zhao et al., 2007), prior research provides limited insight about what psychological contract fulfillment (PCF) represents at higher levels of analysis. A growing line of research has started to empirically assess the existence of PCF at the team level of analysis (e.g. De Vos & Tekleab, 2014) and new theoretical developments have been recently published (e.g., Laulié & Tekleab, 2016). However, several questions remain unanswered as the literature is still in a fledging state. In this dissertation, I develop and test a model of shared PCFs at the team level.

Hypotheses were examined in an organization in Chile using data from multiple teams, multiple times, and multiple sources. The results show that employees of the same team tend to share their opinions about how the organization fulfills the promises to all the team members and to the team as a whole, creating a shared, emergent team-level phenomenon. The results also support that justice climate and perceived organizational support climate were significant antecedents of shared PCFs. Shared PCFs were significant predictors of team organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), average turnover intentions, and team engagement. Moreover, the results support that the effects of shared PCFs on different team outcomes are generally stronger than the effects of individual PCF on individual-level outcomes. In addition, team affective tone was found to be an important mediator between shared PCFs and team outcomes. Shared PCFs were also significant moderators of the relationship between individual PCF and some specific individual-level outcomes (contextual performance, turnover intentions). Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.

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