In the past decades, the public sector has undergone important organisational policy changes, referred to as New Public Management. These management strategies focus on continuous cost improvements and rationalisation of operations. In the aftermath of these policy changes, we have seen reports of increased work demands and less professional autonomy amongst welfare workers. Against this background, the thesis sets out to explore welfare workers’ relationship to their organisation. This was done by investigating how psychosocial and organisational factors related to a number of outcomes assumed to be indicators of the quality of the relationship. Theoretically, the thesis was inspired by psychological contract theory, but also relates to other concepts and theories found in organisational research. The thesis is based on four empirical studies, all of which relate to how welfare workers have perceived their relationship to their organisation. Study I aimed to qualitatively investigate how turnover processes evolved amongst statutory social workers who voluntarily had resigned from their jobs. The results showed that dismissive/admonishing organisational responses to the social workers’ perceived work-related dissatisfactions reinforced their beliefs in psychological contract violation, which led to resignation. Study II and III employed national web-based questionnaire data collected from employees and managers in the social services. The results of Studies II-III showed that if organisations want welfare workers to stop considering exit, want to counteract silence, want to reduce stress-related ill health and want to improve organisational commitment and job satisfaction, management strategies need to be developed that lead to fewer conflicting demands, a reasonable workload and a greater professional autonomy. The results also showed that the organisation’s open climate and attitude towards employees was of great importance for the studied outcome variables. Study IV was based on questionnaire data from different occupational groups in two municipal organisations. The results showed that organisational resources explained additional variance in organisational identification and organisational pride, beyond the contributions of workgroup resources. From the findings of this thesis, it can be concluded that the psychosocial demands need to be balanced with organisational resources in order to (re)build a trustworthy employee-organisation relationship. Further, organisations need to reconsider their human resource management strategies and practices, e.g., by enabling a continuous and open dialogue between the strategic and operational levels. Such changes may lead to balanced psychological contracts between welfare workers and the organisation that can improve the organisation’s stability, continuity and, ultimately, the quality of the welfare services.

Businesses are increasingly using social media for crisis communication messages, and so do employees. Given the special relationship with employees, organisations should pay attention to understanding employee communication behaviour (ECB) during an organisational crisis. Drawing from the Situation Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) and the perspective of employees as active participants in crisis communication, this study proposes an evidence-based employee-focused conceptual framework of the anticipated ECBs on social media during an organisational crisis and in response to crisis type and the crisis response strategy utilized by organisations. This research aims to examine the impact of crisis types and crisis response strategies on employee communication behaviour outcomes in social media. The research employs a 2 (crisis type: victim crisis or preventable crisis) * 2 (crisis response strategy: accommodative or defensive) qualitative experimental design. 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in Kuwait with employees working in different industries in the private sector to investigate: 1) ECB on social media in response to defensive and accommodative crisis response strategies in a preventable crisis type, 2) ECB on social media in response to defensive and accommodative crisis response strategies in a victim crisis type, and 3)Employee-organisation relationship (EOR) influence on ECB on social media during an organisational crisis. This research argues that the anticipated ECB is within four classifications 1) Proactive advocacy ECB, 2) Reactive advocacy ECB, 3) neutral ECB, and 4) Adversary ECB. The findings show that employees are more likely to engage in advocacy ECB if the crisis response is informative, regardless of the crisis type. An adversary ECB is expected when the organisation faces a preventable crisis type and utilizes a defensive response strategy. Additionally, a positive EOR encourages a more advocacy ECB.