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Serving the Cause When My Organization Does Not: A Self-affirmation Model of Employees’ Compensatory Responses to Ideological Contract Breach

Deng, Hong; Coyle-Shapiro, Jacqueline; Zhu, Yanting; Wu, Chia-huei

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Authors

Profile image of Hong Deng

Hong Deng hong.deng@durham.ac.uk
Honorary Professor

Jacqueline Coyle-Shapiro

Yanting Zhu

Chia-huei Wu



Abstract

Transactional and relational contract breach occur when organizations fail to deliver on promised personal benefits for employees and are associated with negative behaviors reciprocating such mistreatment. However, recent research suggests that ideological contract breach, a unique form of contract breach, may yield constructive behaviors because it is not organizations’ direct personal mistreatment of employees, but organizations’ abandonment of a valued cause to benefit a third party. Such an interesting prediction goes beyond the dominant social-exchange framework, which mainly forecasts destructive responses to breach. In this research, we develop a novel self-affirmation model to explain how ideological contract breach results in counterintuitive positive outcomes. In a hospital field study among medical professionals (N = 362) and their supervisors (N = 129), we found that ideological contract breach induces employees’ rumination about the breach, which in turn prompts them to self-affirm core values at work. This self-affirmation eventually spurs proactive serving behavior and self-improvement behavior to compensate for the breached ideology. Professional identification enhances this self-affirmation process.

Citation

Deng, H., Coyle-Shapiro, J., Zhu, Y., & Wu, C.-H. (2023). Serving the Cause When My Organization Does Not: A Self-affirmation Model of Employees’ Compensatory Responses to Ideological Contract Breach. Personnel Psychology, 76(4), 1161-1186. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12546

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 28, 2022
Online Publication Date Oct 29, 2022
Publication Date 2023-12
Deposit Date Oct 19, 2022
Publicly Available Date Dec 7, 2022
Journal Personnel Psychology
Print ISSN 0031-5826
Electronic ISSN 1744-6570
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 76
Issue 4
Pages 1161-1186
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12546
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1191305

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.







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