Summary of Literature Review

As has been detailed in Chapter 2, there is no general agreement on the appropriate definition of psychological contracts. For the purpose of this research a definition proposed by Rousseau (1995) has been adopted. Thus, psychological contracts are defined here as perceptions of individual employees about the mutual obligations between themselves and the organisation they work for. The main advantage of this definition is that it offers a clear unit of analysis for empirical research. It has also been argued that organisations do not have psychological contracts with their employees. Organisations have employment strategies which they use to shape the exchange relationship between themselves and their employees. It has been proposed that supervisors do form perceptions of the mutual obligations between their subordinates and the organisation. However, it has also been proposed that they are different from psychological contracts because they are partly third party judgements and thus similar to implied contracts. Exploring similarities and differences between supervisor implied contracts and employee psychological contracts has been highlighted as an interesting question for further research.