You care about me, but can I count on you? Applying a psychological contract perspective to investigate what makes employees willing to be internally employable

Abstract

For this study, we adopted a psychological contract-based perspective to investigate whether the fulfillment of perceived developmental promises made to employees is positively related to their willingness to accept internal job-related changes when needed by the organization, a construct we refer to as the willingness to be internally employable. We also examined the role played by line managers in facilitating employees’ willingness to be internally employable by fulfilling perceived developmental promises. We tested our conceptual model with data collected from ninety-eight recently hired employees in a Norwegian organization under an initiative emphasizing employee development. We found that developmental promise fulfillment is more important for employees’ willingness to be internally employable in this context than any perceived provision of developmental inducements in isolation. Further, we found that employee perceptions of the developmental support provided by their line manager related positively to their willingness to be internally employable by way of developmental promise fulfillment; however, this was not the case with perceived developmental inducements. Our findings support the importance of developmental promise fulfillment in fostering employee willingness to be internally employable and the critical role played by line managers in fulfilling developmental promises that employees believe have been made by their organization.

Keywords:

• Internal employability
• employee willingness to be internally employable
• psychological contracts
• developmental promise fulfillment
• developmental supervisor support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We acknowledge that researchers have applied psychological contract theory to examine employees’ perceived employability (i.e., self-perceived chances of employment) on the external job market in relation to perceived psychological contract promises and obligations (De Cuyper, Van der Heijden, & De Witte, 2011; Dries, Forrier, De Vos, & Pepermans, 2014; Van der Vaart, Linde, De Beer, & Cockeran, 2015).

2 In line with Coyle-Shapiro and Kessler (2000), we view developmental promise fulfillment as the difference between the developmental promises employees perceive have been made to them by their organization and the developmental inducements they perceive they have received from the organization.

3 We thank the editorial team for alerting us to this conceptual distinction relating to the term “orientation.”

4 HRM devolution refers to “the delegation of the responsibility for implementing HR practices to line managers outside the HR function” (Kehoe & Han, 2020, p. 114).