The Role of Psychological Contracts within Internal Service Networks

Abstract

This article explores internal service relationships within the service delivery process of a large telecommunications company. The empirical research generates an expression of the psychological contracts held between internal customers and suppliers based upon the content analysis of qualitative interviews. Seven hundred and twenty three contractual expectations are reduced into 17 categories and this analytical framework is applied to measure the strength of the psychological contract between three interdependent service groups. The research explores how established psychological contracts encouraged the provision of flexible internal services and how psychological contract breach precipitated service delivery problems with clear implications for managers and service organisations.

The impact of psychological contracts upon trust and commitment within supplier–buyer relationships: A social exchange view

“…Within marketing the results from the only other study encapsulating the effects of breaches to the psychological contract have shown these to be negative (Llewellyn, 2001). However, it should be noted that this study pertained to the internal service relationship within a large telecommunications study, and the research design was an inductive-lead case study.…”

“…These have been modelled within the employment relationship from the perspective of the formation of psychological contracts (Herriot, Johansen, & Seyed-Mohamed, 1997;Robinson, Kraatz, & Rousseau, 1994;Rousseau, 1990). Whilst psychological contracts have been shown to exist within the context of internal customers (Llewellyn, 2001) and business-to-business relationships (Kingshott, 2002) this important stream of social exchange grounded literature has been largely unexplored within the marketing discipline.…”

Individual-Level Antecedents to Market-Oriented Actions

“…Research links commitment to employee knowledge sharing attitudes and behaviors (Hislop, 2003), and more specifically, to firm level market-orientation (Zhang et al, 2004). Recent empirical work, both quantitative (Dabos and Rousseau, 2004) and qualitative (Llewellyn, 2001), demonstrates this link between employee knowledge sharing and shared expectations of reciprocity. The qualitative study, conducted in a large telecommunications company, found that matched (reciprocal) psychological contracts encouraged the provision of internal customer services whereas unmatched contracts detracted from the service offering (Llewellyn, 2001).…”

“…(specifically, Blancero et al, 1996, Blancero and Johnson, 2001, Eddleston et al, 2002, Llewellyn, 2001). Few of the marketing studies develop the role of psychological contracts from the perspectives of employees across the organization, preferring to focus on those with close customer contact, such as sales.…”

How Human Resource Outsourcing Affects Organizational Learning in the Knowledge Economy

“…The first perspective considers internal marketing as a strategy that builds relationships between internal customers and suppliers (Llewellyn, 2001). A second perspective defines internal marketing as the use of external marketing strategies to promote internal initiatives, thereby convincing employees in the same way they would convince customers (George and Gronroos, 1991).…”