How can we understand the relationship between employer and employee? What determines the give and take of such relationships and what happens when they go wrong? This text is a comprehensive overview of what is now the major way of trying to understand the employment relationship - the concept of the psychological contract.

How can we understand the relationship between employer and employee? What determines the give and take of such relationships and what happens when they go wrong? This book is the first to provide a comprehensive and critical overview of what is now the major way of trying to understand the employment relationship - the concept of the psychological contract. Written contracts often specify very little in terms of the important details about what we are prepared to do for our employer and what we want back in return. The psychological contract considers these implicit or unwritten aspects of the employment relationship. What do employees really expect from work? What happens when the contract, or 'the deal', with their employer is broken? How well does the psychological contract help us understand what happens at work between an employee and their employer? Is the idea of practical value in managing employees? How can our understanding of this important concept be developed in the future? Starting with a history of the concept, from its emergence in the 1960s through to it finding wider acceptance in the 1990s, the authors trace the conflicting and changing definitions of the psychological contract. The shifting meaning of the concept allows possible methodological and conceptual weaknesses of the psychological contract to be explored, such as the conceptual emphasis on process within the employment relationship, which has so far been neglected by researchers. The authors start to address this issue by considering whether employees and employers can use what is known about the psychological contract to better manage the employment relationship. Written to provide a comprehensive yet critical introduction to the topic, Understanding Psychological Contracts at Work will be key reading for advanced students, lecturers, and researchers in Organizational Psychology, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Human Resource Management, Occupational Psychology; and professionals and practitioners in Occupational Psychology, Management Consultancy, Human Resource Management, Careers and Career Management, Career Counselling, Workplace Training.

Bringing together a wide range of theory from social and cognitive psychology, organizational behaviour, organizational learning and the management of change, this text draws useful conclusions about important psychological processes.

This volume of the series Research in Human Resource Management (HRM) focuses on a number of important issues in HRM and OB including performance appraisal, political skill, gratitude, psychological contracts, the philosophical underpinnings of HRM, pay and compensation messages, and electronic human resource management. For example, the first article by Cleveland and Murphy considers a very controversial issue (i.e., the reasons that organizations are abandoning the use of performance appraisal). The next article by Harris, Ferris, Summers, and Munyon is extremely interesting, and focuses on how composite political skills (e.g., social astuteness, interpersonal influence ) helps individuals develop productive work relationships in organizations. The third article by Scandura and Sharif presents a very innovative model of gratitude in organizations, and the authors argue that gratitude is essential for maintaining positive social relations in organizations. The fourth article by Suazo and Stone-Romero provides an extremely comprehensive review of the theory and research on psychological contracts in organizations from 1960-2015. The subsequent article by Bae, Kang and Kim presents a very unique perspective on HRM, and considers the philosophical underpinnings of the field. The sixth article by Murray, Dulebohn, Roehling, and Werling presents a very innovative model to explain the role that organizational messages about changes in pay or compensation systems have on anticipatory pay satisfaction. The final article in the series by Johnson, Thatcher, and Burleson presents a thought-provoking framework for understanding the key role that information technology (IT) plays in the field of HRM. The series should be useful to researchers and doctoral students in the fields of HRM, OB, and Industrial and Organizational Psychology. It should also be relevant for doctoral courses and scientist-practitioners in these fields.

This book acknowledges the significant changes in the context and contours of the traditional employee-employer relationship over the last several decades and highlights the emergence of exciting new directions for the study of psychological contracts (PC). New technologies and emergent forms of work are extending ‘the temporal and spatial boundaries’ of employment, such as through the rise of the shared economy and ‘gig’ workers, uptake of virtual work and flexible work arrangements, and the use of off-site co-working spaces. Technology use now permeates many aspects of jobs, supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Factors that motivate work are also changing as new generations of employees embrace their callings and organizations increasingly recognize their responsibilities to society and to employee wellbeing. These changes are altering the traditional employer-employee relationship and are key motivators of this volume. The chapters in this volume chart new directions for PC research over the next decade by widening the theoretical and methodological lenses used to explore PC processes. This book will be valuable to advanced students, researchers, and practitioners in organizational psychology, organization studies, workplace training and human resource management, as well as those interested in improved performance of people and organizations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.