A study of employee affective organizational commitment and retention in Pakistan: the roles of psychological contract breach and norms of reciprocity

Abstract

Social exchange theory and notions of reciprocity have long been assumed to explain the relationship between psychological contract breach and important employee outcomes. To date, however, there has been no explicit testing of these assumptions. This research, therefore, explores the mediating role of negative, generalized, and balanced reciprocity, in the relationships between psychological contract breach and employees’ affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions. A survey of 247 Pakistani employees of a large public university was analyzed using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping techniques, and provided excellent support for our model. As predicted, psychological contract breach was positively related to negative reciprocity norms and negatively related to generalized and balanced reciprocity norms. Negative and generalized (but not balanced) reciprocity were negatively and positively (respectively) related to employees’ affective organizational commitment and fully mediated the relationship between psychological contract breach and affective organizational commitment. Moreover, affective organizational commitment fully mediated the relationship between generalized and negative reciprocity and employees’ turnover intentions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Psychological contract breach
• reciprocity norms
• social exchange
• Pakistan

Notes

1. All fit statistics and hypothesized direct and indirect effects held when the model was tested without the control variables included.

2. As a further test of CMB, we also retested our hypothesized structural model with it including the common latent variable used in our CFA (see Podsakoff et al., 2003). In other words, using CMB-corrected variables. Again, there was no significant effect on the model’s fit indices and all statistically significant relationships held.