The psychological contract: A concept in need of closer scrutiny?

Exploring reciprocity through the lens of the psychological contract: Employee and employer perspectives

“…However, as Arnold (1996) As Rousseau and Tijoriwala (1998) note "…central to the workings of psychological contracts is the interplay between employee and employer obligations, their relative magnitude and contingent relations…" (p.692). However, the focus of this interplay has generally taken one direction; that is, from the employer to the employee.…”

“…Although the distinction between transactional and relational obligations has been made by researchers (Rousseau, 1990;Robinson, Kraatz & Rousseau, 1994), the demarcation between these obligations is not so clear cut (Arnold, 1996;Coyle-Shapiro, 2000).…”

Conducting Postgraduate Level Research: Selecting A Methodology- A Students’ Perspective

“…Whilst other researchers (Sparrow and Marchington, 1998; view the PC as an analytical tool to grasp the complex changes that occur throughout the organization when new employment practices are adopted, Guest and Conway (1998) view the PC as a means to understand the state of the employment relationship in an organization and for plotting corresponding changes. In terms of the various methodologies used, we can see a significant preference to questionnaire and interview type research (Robinson;1996;Guest & Conway, 2000;2002) …”

“…The psychological contract firstly coined by Argyris in 1960 has been thoroughly researched and argued. The various arguments in the field include questions about its nature, whether the term `contract` is accurate or not especially when compared with written contracts (Arnold, 1996) whilst others attributed to this type of unwritten agreements significant enough powers to resemble in terms of validity and influence a standardised written contracts (Sparrow and Marchington, 1998;Deery, Iverson and Walsh, 2006). Psychological contracts have been often defined according to their particular characteristics.…”

Psychological Contracts

“…The key issue is the crossover of items (Taylor & Tekleab, 2004). For example, training may be a transactional or relational item (Arnold, 1996) and one study supports training as an independent dimension . Attempting to classify psychological contract items into relational-transactional factors has not yielded consistent results.…”