The psychological contract provides a framework for understanding the relationship between employees and employers. The objective of the research was to determine the type of psychological contract developed by higher education academics. In addition, the research objective was to examine the effect of employees’ perception of the human resource practices of their employers on their psychological contract. There have been a number of conceptual and empirical studies on the psychological contract of employees and its relationships to other organisational variables such as human resource practices. However, there has been minimal research on the psychological contracts of academics in higher education and the effect of human resource practices on their psychological contracts. The research was based on a cross-sectional survey that comprised the Psychological Contract Inventory (Rousseau, 2000), the Human Resource Practice Scale (Geringer et al., 2002), and questions on the demographic and job characteristics of academics as employees in the higher education sector in Canada. The research involved 405 academics from Canadian higher education institutions. The response rate was 70%. The research found that employees’ perception of the recruitment and selection, training and development and compensation and benefits HR practices had significant and positive effects on the relational and balanced psychological contracts of academics, thereby building commitment, loyalty and the desire for professional and career development. The training and development HR practices were found to have the strongest positive effect on the relational and balanced types of psychological contracts. The research indicated that the psychological contract theory should be researched using newer and a combination of approaches. The research made several theoretical and practical contributions to the psychological contract theory and human resource management in the higher education sector.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:707593 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Yesufu, Lawal |
| Contributors | Yalabik, Zeynep ; Van Rossenberg, Yvonne |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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