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To examine the existence of career psychological contracts and consequences of perceived violations for traditional, protean and boundaryless career psychological contracts in one sample of aerospace employees.

Structured questionnaires were used to collect data. Regression analysis was used to test hypotheses.

Most employees consider traditional career goals like job security and upward mobility important, but believed the organization failed to meet these perceived obligations. Perceived violations of psychological contract obligations for job security and training reduced organizational commitment, and violations of perceived upward mobility opportunity obligations were related to intentions to leave. Employees' commitment to managers moderated the effect of low levels of organizational career contract violations, but had no effect on intentions to leave if managers violated psychological career contracts or if the organization had a high level of perceived career psychological contract violations.

Organizations could benefit from providing more training in career support for managers and scholars should examine organizational and managerial psychological contracts as separate constructs.

The psychological contract is the construct through which one attempts to explain the quality of the employment relationship from the point of view of each of the contract party with regards to obligations and inducements and can be employed to explain organizational change dynamics. Failing to provide promised obligations is termed as violation. This study examined the occurrence of contract violation amongst 132 Maltese public service employees at a time when radical changes in practices were being proposed. Violation was conceptualised in two ways: under‐fulfilled employer obligations and over‐fulfilled employee obligations. Results show that whereas employees were likely to report that their employer violated obligations, they themselves were more likely to over‐fulfil their obligations towards their employer. In addition, contract term violations were related to important work outcomes and generally in a different way for the two forms of violation. Results are discussed and future research suggestions highlighted.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between consumers’ perceived justice and their behavioral intentions and explores the effects of psychological contract violation on the relationships.

This study conducts sampling through the survey to consumers after restaurant dining. This study collected data from 400 respondents and analyzed the data with the structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that consumers who experience higher level of distribution justice and procedure justice are more likely to have behavioral intentions. This study also reveals that psychological contract violation is a partial mediator of the above relationships. Consumers will feel less psychological contract violation when they perceive more distribution justice and procedure justice and will not significantly affect them more likely to repurchase intention.

During restaurant service, if consumers feel distribution or procedure injustice, they are more likely to engage in negative word-of-mouth. However, the lack of significant and positive effect of interaction justice on negative word-of-mouth in this study can be because of other intervening variables, such as intensity. Furthermore, in terms of customer’s repurchase intention, the results indicate significant and positive effects for all three types of justice on repurchase intention.

This paper aims to explore the impact of corporate social responsibility and hypocrisy on the relationship among psychological contract violation, trust and perceived betrayal.

This study used purposive sampling and selected students in Taiwan as the research participants. The theory of psychological contract violation and consumer awareness process in violation hypocrisy on psychological contract violation were used to investigate the effect of its impact on trust and perceived betrayal. Then, the moderating effect of social responsibility and hypocritical on trust, and the mediating effect of trust between psychological contract violation and perceived betrayal were analyzed.

The results indicated that hypocrisy had a significant and negative impact on psychological contract violation toward trust; hypocrisy had a significantly positive impact on psychological contract violation toward perceived betrayal; trust had a significantly negative impact on perceived betrayal; perceived betrayal had a significantly positive impact on both direct and indirect revenges; trust had a mediating effect between hypocrisy toward psychological contract violation and perceived betrayal; and higher hypocrisy would produce a stronger effect through trust on the relationships between hypocrisy toward psychological contract violation and perceived betrayal.

Perception of consumers would differ whenever there were failures of service recovery occurred; especially, stronger betrayal feeling would be perceived with the companies who emphasized social responsibility and did not carry out what they should do. Research results could be references for companies whom advertising and praising social responsibility.

Consumers may boycott firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, but little is known about when, why and how they would respond in this way. Based on psychological contract violation and discount principles, the purpose of this paper is to argue that timing and fit of CSR activities are the main dimensions of consumers’ psychological contract. It is posited that CSR activities would be boycotted if consumers perceived violation of their psychological contract, and their altruistic tendency would have a moderating effect on this mechanism.

This paper takes the form of an empirical study using a sample of 434 respondents through scene-questionnaire survey in central China.

It is found that (1) low fit or reactive CSR activities would induce consumers’ psychological contract violation, and the latter has a more significant influence; (2) perceived CSR is negatively related with consumers’ boycott behaviors, but CSR activities would be boycotted if consumers’ psychological contracts are violated; (3) the negative relationship between perceived CSR and consumers’ boycott behaviors would be strengthened by consumers’ altruistic tendency, and the positive relationship between consumers’ psychological contract violation and their boycott behaviors would also be strengthened by their altruistic tendency.

This paper has significant theoretical implications, as it answers the question that when, why and how CSR activities would be boycotted. Besides, it contributes to literature on psychological contract for applying it to CSR research field. Furthermore, the double-edged effect of consumers’ altruistic tendency extends literature on pro-social behaviors.

This paper is of interests to corporate management and academics who wish to understand when and why consumers would boycott CSR activities and the factors that would relax consumers’ negative responses.

This is the first paper that investigates when, why and how CSR activities would be boycotted from the perspective of consumers’ psychological contract violation.

The purpose of this paper is to establish an integrated framework of the antecedents of enforcement after contract violations in construction projects and to examine whether contract provisions (control and coordination provisions) and trust (goodwill and competence trust) affect enforcement mechanisms (contractual enforcement and relational enforcement).

A survey method was employed to test the hypotheses. The authors collected data from the Chinese construction industry, and general contractor respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire about a contract violation by one of their subcontractors.

Control provisions and competence trust are positively related to contractual enforcement, but goodwill trust is negatively related to contractual enforcement. Relational enforcement is influenced by goodwill trust and competence trust.

This study treats contract violations as a given variable, and it focuses on contract violations by subcontractors. The cross-sectional design makes it difficult to confirm the causality of the relationships.

Overly strict contractual enforcement can generate disputes and a vicious cycle of retaliation, and overly severe relational enforcement can damage a potentially profitable long-term relationship. In construction projects, the violating party will benefit from this study to avoid excessively contractual enforcement and relational enforcement, thus developing a more collaborative atmosphere on the current project and even establishing a solid long-term relationship.

This study extends the project management literature by investigating the antecedents of enforcement after contract violations, an area not yet fully researched.

The purpose of this paper is to examine perceptions of the psychological contract (PC) simultaneously at the individual level (fulfillment of obligations by the organization and PC violation) and the organizational level (normative contract), and their relationship with employees’ evaluations of organizational justice. Based on justice and information processing approaches, the hypothesis is that normative contract has an effect on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice, and also moderates the relationship between PC violation and organizational justice.

Multilevel modeling was employed with a multinational sample of 5,338 employees nested in 214 companies.

Findings showed that beyond the positive effect of fulfillment of obligations by the organization, PC violation has a strong negative effect on organizational justice. In addition, normative contract has a positive effect on organizational justice, showing that when shared perceptions of normative contract are higher, then the organizational justice perceptions of employees are also higher. Furthermore, the normative contract moderated the relationship between PC violation and organizational justice, showing that the negative relationship of PC violation with organizational justice was stronger when the normative contract was higher.

Findings suggest that normative contract has effects on organizational justice, and that PC violation had more negative effects on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice perceptions when colleagues’ shared perceptions of fulfillment were higher. This means that social context (shared perceptions in an organization about the PC) has effects on individual perceptions of organizational justice. Companies need to pay attention to detrimental effects on employees who perceive a worse PC than their colleagues do.

The study extends the current research by demonstrating that employee–employer exchanges are not limited to individual level effects because shared perceptions of PC fulfillment (normative contract) also have relevant effects on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the psychological contract from the employers' perspective, by examining violations where the employer rather than employee is the victim, an issue that has so far seldom been addressed in extant psychological contract research.

Small business owners are studied using qualitative interviews, incorporating critical incidents technique. Interview transcriptions have been analysed using template analysis.

The analysis reveals the significant disruption and damage caused by these incidents, with employers involving other employees in their response as they set about the essential repair work required. Employers actively mobilised shared understandings at the normative level of the group, reinforcing and sometimes renegotiating the employee obligations, as they seek to reaffirm their authority in the eyes of all of their employees. This response reflects the collective psychological contracts the employer holds with each of their employees and their concerns to limit the fall‐out/damage when one employee commits a violation.

The focus on small firms limits the generality of the findings with further research needed both in smaller and larger organisations to explore how organisational size impacts upon the processes identified, and the effect such incidents have when the organisation is represented by agents such as supervisors or managers. This calls for more in‐depth qualitative research in order to explore the highly nuanced experiences of employers and their representatives. The implications of the findings suggest the value of more explicit communication of employee obligations to prevent future psychological contract violation, and the role other employees may usefully play in this process.

This paper contributes to the much‐neglected study of employers' experiences of psychological contract violations committed by their employees.

This paper introduces the concept of dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand and argues that when customers perceive that a brand has failed to fulfill its promises, a psychological brand contract breach occurs, which in turn leads to a psychological brand contract violation, which evokes dysfunctional customer behavior toward the brand. In addition, this study investigates whether the impact of a breach of this contract is dependent on brand relationship quality, brand apology and restitution.

Study 1 conducted the online survey and 224 respondents were used for data analysis and the moderating role of brand relationship quality was examined. Study 2 conducted an experiment with 201 participants to test the moderating role of brand apology and restitution.

This study found the moderating role of brand relationship quality, brand apology and brand restitution on the relationship between a psychological brand contract breach and dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand (i.e. brand-negative word-of-mouth, brand retaliation and brand boycott), which is mediated by psychological brand contract violation.

This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of dysfunctional customer behavior toward a brand by integrating the literature on brand management with the organizational literature on psychological contracts between organizations and their employees. Furthermore, this study sheds light on the effectiveness of reparative actions by the firm after occurrence of the psychological brand contract breach.

Though there are still political turbulences, the economic cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan is inseparable. Cooperation between enterprises on both sides has become more frequent. Studying the similarities and differences between employees in Cross-Strait enterprises can contribute to human resource management. This paper aims to study the cultural difference between employees of mainland China and in Taiwan when facing psychological contract violations.

A total of 811 valid sample questionnaires were taken from Cross-Strait private enterprise employees. This research adopted partial least squares-structural equation model statistical analysis as an empirical research evaluation.

This study finds that psychological contract violation has a significant positive impact on turnover intention and a significant negative impact on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the Chinese context. There exist cultural differences between the employees of mainland China and Taiwan. When facing psychological contract violation, it is found that employees from Taiwan are more likely to have a strong turnover intention but still keep higher job performance. Employees from mainland China are found to be more likely to have higher OCB.

The originality of this research lies in establishing a stronger theoretical model to understand employee behavior. This paper verifies the validity of this model under the Chinese context. Moreover, this paper verifies the cultural difference between Cross-Strait employees.