The following text is a brief discussion about psychological contracts in a working environment. It gives insight of the most common approaches regarding psychological contract and its attributes.

The definition of a psychological contract is quite congruent in the theories by Herriot, Kotter and Rousseau:

It refers to [not yet addressed or unkown] expectations of an individual towards the [professional] environment measured by the grade of fulfilment in promises and relationships.

In my role as a team leader I have recognized that it is not an easy task to measure the health of each employees psychological contract. It even has been described as an “analytic nightmare” (Guest 1998).

• Employees are unaware of their expectations in detail.
• Employees might not speak freely about their (high) expectations.
• Awareness of expectations is often raised while breach or violate them. Too late then.
• Measures are done through (expensive) internal researches with a broad audience rather than individuals.
• Research findings are often anonymous.

Therefore, I’d rather start thinking on expectation or relationship management where the recognizing own feelings and those of others to motivate and manage relationships (Goleman 1999) might be of higher value.

Meeting expectations – or in this context – meeting the psychological contract makes people feel more connected to the company with higher work output and high quality work output (Whiteley and Hessan 1997).

According to the European Commission of Employment, it will be more likely that people have to work longer, stay longer in one company and are older in contrast to the “new psychological contract“ (Herriot, 1992), with a more flexible model.

A demographical revolution is foreseen (Backes/Clemens 1998: 31).The unwritten expectations are different from those of younger people; for youngers it might become more important to offer part-time jobs (Conway and Briner, 2002), to have the possibility to work from home (Harwood, 2003) and that the work-life balance plays a much higher role (Management Today, 2003) seen as transactional contracts.

This has been widely introduced in “modern” companies.

In contrast to the elder that might find relational contracts more interesting where “hard facts” such as a loan or job security count more.

In other words: ageing people my face their psychological contract breached with all the negative aspects (Herriot et al, 1997).

To meet the different expectations it is obvious that segmentation has to be introduced by age or “expectation” group similar to the concepts know in marketing. In marketing, segmentations are used to group and meet a target group (Wikipedia: Marktsegmentierung 2011). It is common to segment by Demographics. Demographic segmentation enables leaders and HR departments to improve the quality of psychological contract. Even with a change in demographics, not just everybody is old, there will be elder and younger people working together with different expectations.

Bibliography

• < Zurück
• Weiter >