THE INFLUENCE OF THE CONSTRUCTION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ENTERPRISE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT ON ALLEVIATING EMPLOYEES' PSYCHOLOGICAL ANXIETY
Authors: Du Hui , Zhu Xiaomei , He Qin , Liu Shuzhen , Ping Simon 
Published: July 2022

Background

This paper aims to explore and test the construction of manager contract in digital transformation center, and test the following assumptions: in China, psychological contract performance is positively correlated with role performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and negatively correlated with turnover intention. This paper studies the influence of on-the-job employees' psychological anxiety on turnover intention.

Research Objects and Methods

This study puts forward three hypotheses: employers' psychological contract performance will have a negative impact on Chinese employees' turnover intention, employers' psychological contract performance will have a positive impact on Chinese employees' job performance, and employers' psychological contract performance will have a positive impact on Chinese employees' organizational citizenship behavior. Study 1 used exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to explore and test the construction of psychological contract, including 588 Chinese employees. Then, the hypothesis was tested by using a sample of 509 Chinese employees and hierarchical regression in longitudinal study 2. In addition, this study also uses the trait anxiety scale to measure employees. This set of scales reflects three different components of psychological control. Each scale can be regarded as independent, in order to describe the subjects' views on causality. Internal control measures the extent to which people believe they can control their own lives. The powerful others (P) scale involves whether subjects believe that others can control events in their lives. The opportunity scale measures a person's belief that opportunities can affect his / her life experiences and outcomes. The IPC subscale contains items from the Rotter I-E scale, and some items are specially prepared to evaluate the components of psychological control. Each subscale contains 8 items, and the whole scale has 24 items, which are evaluated on a 7-point system. All items are stated in the first person, and the score ranges from - 3 (very disagree) to 10 3 (very agree). When calculating the total score, 24 points are added to offset the negative score, so the score range of each subscale is 0-48.

Results

The factor analysis results of study 1 revealed five dimensions of psychological contract from the perspective of employer obligation. The hierarchical regression results of study 2 show that psychological contract performance has a positive impact on in role performance and organizational citizenship behavior, and a negative impact on turnover intention; These results are consistent with the results of most previous empirical studies. However, employees' responses to the five components of psychological contract performance are different. Our findings are particularly important because the traditional view is that achieving growth and development is negatively correlated with turnover intention. In fact, training and development is a double-edged sword. The increase of training and development opportunities will improve employees' work ability and external work opportunities. Therefore, managers often face the dilemma of employee turnover after training, especially in China's private enterprises with low material conditions. The results also show that although employee anxiety is positively correlated with enterprise contract expectation, it is not statistically significant. In the psychological anxiety of employees, debilitating anxiety dominated, and the results were statistically significant. This means that debilitating anxiety can be used as an indicator to measure the level of employee anxiety. Our results show that employers' non performance of contracts is negatively correlated with employees' turnover intention. Pearson correlation in high anxiety group was significantly higher than that in low anxiety group. This shows that employees with poor professional level are more likely to be anxious than employees with good professional level. Independent sample t-test confirmed that there was significant difference in debilitating anxiety between the two groups (P &lt; 0.01), but there was no significant difference in promoting anxiety (P &gt; 0.05).

Conclusion

On the one hand, the research results emphasize the construction of psychological contract and the impact of psychological contract performance on employees' work attitude and behavior. In China, this is a relatively neglected research field. On the other hand, the study still has limitations in explaining the results. First, although the measurement of independent variables and dependent variables is carried out separately, the difference of common methods cannot be excluded by using self-assessment tools to measure all variables in the study. Secondly, the data in Study 2 are from several Chinese companies, which are mainly composed of young men. Therefore, our findings should be verified in future research. Third, the study only examined employees' views on employers' obligations. Future research can combine the relationship between employers and employees in terms of employers' obligations, so as to better reflect the essence of psychological contract. In short, we should fully enhance the loyalty of employers to the contract, actively pay attention to the changes of employees' psychology, emotion, behavior and ability and their impact on post play and employees' healthy behavior, and be good builders, managers, coordinators and collaborators of the enterprise. According to the psychological characteristics of employees, actively and flexibly organize rich and colorful activities, strive to create a relaxed and harmonious living atmosphere, create a friendly and mutually beneficial contractual relationship, encourage and guide employees to keep their psychology in the best state and promote the healthy development of their good work and life.

Acknowledgements

Supported by projects’ grants from Premium Funding Project for Academic Human Resources Development of Beijing Union University (No.BPHR2020CS08), National Social Science Foundation of China (No.20BGL135), Key project of the Social Science Program of Beijing Municipal Education Commission(No.SZ202011417026), Major project of Beijing Municipal Social Science Foundation(No.18ZDA09), Key project of the National Social Science Foundation(No.19AGL025) and the Academic Research Projects of Beijing Union University(No. SK40202101).