Psychological Contract Breach and Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Reviews.

A psychological contract is a set of individual beliefs that a person has about the reciprocal obligations and benefits established in an exchange relationship, such as an employment relationship in an organizational setting. A psychological contract breach is a subjective experience referred to the perception of one of the parties that the other has failed to adequately fulfill its obligations and promises. Breaches have been systematically connected to employees' attitudes and behaviors that hamper the employment relationship. Despite its apparent clarity, some relevant topics about psychological contract breach, psychological contract fulfillment and the relationships with their consequences still remain unclear. The main objective of this review of reviews is to conduct a review of reviews on psychological contract breaches, considering both systematic reviews and metanalytical papers with the purpose of synthesizing the evidence to date under the psychological contract theory. Using the SPIDER tool, our systematic review of reviews focuses on: (a) Sample; (b) Phenomenon of Interest; (c) Design; (d) Evaluation; and (e) Research type. Finally, only eight systematic reviews and meta-analyses met the inclusion criteria. Of the eight reviews included, seven were meta-analyses while the other was a systematic quantitative review. This study describes the available empirical research on psychological contract breaches and fulfillment and summarizes the meta-analytical evidence on their relationships with attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the role of potential moderator variables. Due to the methodological caveats of the reviews themselves and of the primary studies they were based on, our conclusions about the impact of psychological contract breaches on outcomes still remain tentative.

It Is Better for Younger Workers: The Gain Cycle between Job Crafting and Work Engagement.

Job Crafting has been proposed as a new perspective, consisting in a bottom-up strategy to achieve person-job fit by emphasizing employees' active participation and spontaneous change in job design, which is specifically adequate for older workers. Despite this fact, the cyclical influence between Work Engagement and Job Crafting over time has been less researched. We postulated that a gain cycle could be observed in the relationships between Job Crafting and its outcomes. Hence, we tested a longitudinal moderated mediation model in which Work Engagement increases over time through an increment in Job Crafting behaviors (Hypothesis 1), while this process is moderated by workers' age (Hypothesis 2). The present study follows a three-wave design where participants (N = 126) responded to online surveys at three measurement waves, three months apart. At Time 1 and Time 3, we assessed Work Engagement, Job Crafting behavior, and demographic variables, while at Time 2 we only assessed Job Crafting. Our findings partially differ from what was expected. The findings supported that the relationship between Work Engagement at Time 1 and changes in Job Crafting behavior across time was negative and non-significant, failing to provide support for Hypothesis 1. Related to Hypothesis 2, our results are mixed. Although the interaction between changes in Job Crafting and workers' age did not demonstrate a statistical influence on Work Engagement at Time 3, our findings suggested that the direct influence was complemented by a negative indirect effect through the longitudinal increase of Job Crafting, which mainly affects aged workers. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Job Crafting in Nursing: Mediation between Work Engagement and Job Performance in a Multisample Study.

Job crafting is considered a specific form of proactive behavior whereby workers actively change the actual or perceived characteristics of their jobs in order to better match the demands placed on them and the resources available. As nursing could be considered a stressful profession, job crafting is proposed as a mediator between nurses' work engagement and job performance. Hence, the main objective of this study was to provide empirical evidence on job crafting in nursing, including the three most prominent conceptualizations of the construct. The present research covers three independent empirical studies of registered or practical nurses of Spanish public and private hospitals: Study 1 (N = 699), Study 2 (N = 498), and Study 3 (N = 308). (3) Our results support the hypothesis that nurses' job engagement and job-crafting behaviors can affect their job performance. Our finding corroborates that engaged nurses can act to proactively change their jobs, but comparing different job-crafting conceptualizations and measures, the current findings support that effectiveness of diverse job crafting behaviors could vary. To sum up, as the JDR approach proposed, the present study supports the position that work engagement influences job performance, as well as the mediating role of job crafting in this relationship. The current study takes this knowledge one step further by revealing that not all types of job-crafting behaviors are equally efficient and not all types are adequate for specific working environments, such as nursing.