Editor's Foreword: Fifty Years of Psychological Contract Research from the Touchy/Feely to the Concrete Personal Deal
My research career has been coloured by psychological contracts since being introduced to them in my first post university job as a Research Officer for the British Agricultural Training Board in 1977. The concept had not been readily accepted with one Australian industrial relations academic telling me it was ".too touchy/feely." after a seminar I had given about it at Griffith University in 1994, but now after nearly fifty years since first being described by Argyris (1960) one may suggest that it has 'arrived' with an exponential growth in research and publication, particularly since the publication of the first of Denise Rousseau's articles back in 1988, twenty years ago. The development of that research has been charted previously (Tipples and Verry, 2007) and at September 2009 Google Scholar listed 9,360 references on 'psychological contract' In the thirty years prior to Rousseau's first paper, little empirical research on the construct had been published. One notable piece published by John Kotter in 1973 was not even cited by Rousseau (Kotter, 1973) However, it had highlighted the need to achieve matches in expectations between the parties to a psychological contract as a way of improving job satisfaction, job longevity and work productivity. It is that research that profoundly influenced my personnel management teaching when I commenced at the then Lincoln College in early 1978. My aim was to teach students to achieve balanced expectations between prospective employers and employees when setting up new employment relationships to maximise productivity and job satisfaction, and minimise labour turnover. That policy was based on what later became called a policy of 'Realistic Recruitment' (Tipples, 1996) It seemed intuitively right to me with my limited management experience and I did not concern myself to find other supporting research for this position. That research was convincingly provided by Bauer et al. in a meta analysis in 2007, and subsequently reinforced by Wellin's management consultancy driven book of the same year Managing the Psychological contract Using the Personal Deal to Increase Business Performance (2007) These both supported the 'Contracting' approach laid out on realistic recruitment lines previously (Tipples, 1996) The research initiated by Rousseau and colleagues had a strong quantitative emphasis and has often been preoccupied with what might be described in general terms as contract violations and breaches, and their effects and implications. The research reported in the papers of this issue emanate from different streams. First, Krivokapic Skoko, O'Neill and Dowell take the analysis of academics' psychological contracts from an Australian business school study (O'Neill et al, 2007; Tipples et al, 2007) to a deeper level with both factor and cluster analysis. They unpack the critical elements of the content of their academics psychological contracts, which suggest which dimensions academic managers should be concentrating on. The quantitative methods are used to improve our understanding of the critical components of such academics' psychological contracts. In contrast, Gill's paper is more of a high level literature review, which draws together empirical research on psychological contracts, trust, unions and how they all impact on New Work Practices (NWP) with a view to developing a research agenda. Unlike the previous paper which focused on the individual views of academics and their expectations, this one considers how collective activity through trade unions impacts upon employees psychological contracts, trust and its effects on NWP. Because so much psychological contract research has an individualised view of the employment relationship, the role of trade unions in setting employee expectations has been a relatively minor stream of psychological contract research to this point. The third paper by McComb breaks new ground again with a case study of coaching activities in a large Australasian company in the development of senior managers.