It is your fault! How blame attributions of breach predict employees’ reactions
Journal of Managerial Psychology
ISSN: 0268-3946
Article publication date: 22 September 2017
Issue publication date: 27 October 2017
Abstract
Purpose
Using insights from attributions, planned behavior, and fairness theories, this study examines the effect of blame attributions of psychological contract breach on employees’ attitudes (affective organizational commitment) and behaviors (organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)). The purpose of this paper is to understand whether employees’ reactions depend on the attributions they make concerning who is responsible for the breach.
Design/methodology/approach
Cross-lagged design in which data were collected from 220 employees and their supervisors in a public company at two times. Moderated mediation was tested using the bootstrapping analysis outlined by Hayes (2012).
Findings
The results supported the authors’ predictions: employees’ blame attributions to the organization have a negative impact on OCBs (as rated by supervisors in time 2) through decreased affective organizational commitment, but blame attributions to the economic context act as a buffer to the relationship between blame attributions to organization and affective organizational commitment, with consequences for OCBs.
Research limitations/implications
Attributions can also be made to concrete persons (i.e. supervisor, coworker, self) rather than to just the organization or context.
Practical implications
When hiring, recruiters should provide accurate and realistic promises to the candidates. When facing hard times, managers should provide additional information to employees and adjust their expectations to the current situation of the firm.
Originality/value
This study makes a unique contribution to the literature by questioning the “single story” perspective about reactions to psychological contract breach, in which it is assumed that employees always respond negatively to such event.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This project was supported by a Doctoral Grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) to the first author (No. SFRH/BD/77584/2011). FCT also supports the research unit of Nova School of Business and Economics (No. UID/ECO/00124/2013).
Citation
Costa, S. and Neves, P. (2017), "It is your fault! How blame attributions of breach predict employees’ reactions", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 32 No. 7, pp. 470-483. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-01-2017-0023
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited