Differences in Psychological Contracts in Estonia: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors

Defended on June 13, 2013 at the Estonian Business School.The thesis is available digitally at http://www.ebs. ee/ee/teadustoo-2/publikatsioonid/ebs-doktori/Supervisors: Ruth Alas (Ph.D, Professor), Estonian Business School, Estonia and Mare Teichmann (Ph.D), Tallinn University of Technology, EstoniaChanges in the field of work have changed the traditional system of industrial relations, and traditional understandings are less able to explain contemporary employment relations and behavior in organizations. Different frameworks are needed to explore these emerged relationships. The concept of psychological contracts gained increasing popularity in the early 1990s and was used to describe, analyze and explain the consequences of these changes in organizational and work contexts. The psychological contract seeks to go beyond the limitations of the legal contract of employment and instead considers some of the subjective and normative elements associated with people management (Arnold, 1996). The significance of psychological contracts for employers and organizations lies in the fact that the quality of the psychological contract is determined by organizational leadership and human resource practice, rather than its workforce, as employers rather than employees are in a dominant and advantageous position in designing and developing working conditions and employment relationships.In this thesis employment relations were investigated through psychological contracts at the individual level between employer and employee. This approach permits one to explore and compare the implicit and informal aspects of the employment relationship of both parties. Informal understandings of employment relations usually take the form of perceived obligations (which are the heart of psychological contracts) with strong normative implications about appropriate behavior.This thesis sets out to explore the psychological contracts of Estonian employees in the changed world of work. The main objective of this research was to explore the differences in psychological contracts of Estonian employees and to find the factors that cause these differences and shape psychological contracts.The theoretical model used in this study was feature-oriented and psychological contracts were measured and compared over six discrete dimensions which cover changes in employment relations and also include traditional understandings and expectations. Feature orientation captures more general perceived obligations.The feature-based dimensions were composed based on earlier works on psychological contracts, mostly on frameworks of psychological contract dimensions by the following: Rousseau and McLean Parks (1993) (based on the works of Macneil (1985)), Hiltrop (1996), McLean Parks and Conlon (1995), Herriot, Manning, and Kidd (1997), McLean Parks et al. (1998), Rousseau and Schalk (2000), O'Leary-Kelly and Schenk (2000), and on Sels et al. (2004). Two studies were conducted to achieve the objective. In the first study, psychological contracts were investigated from the employee perspective. Research focused on control variables to assess the independent impact of these variables on the formation of individual psychological contracts. …