An investigation of the effects of psychological contract and organization-based self-esteem on organizational commitment in a sample of permanent and contingent workers.

The findings of this study, as discussed above, indicate that employment status has less of an influence on perceptions of contract obligations and ratings of organizational commitment than how workers in this type of firm (i.e., high-tech) are managed. The lack of permanence in modular organizations (Schilling & Steensma, 2001) and in the knowledge industry (Szabo & Ndgyesi, 2005) suggests that the antecedents of environment, or organization-based variables, and organizational commitment should be important to managers. They should focus on doing what is necessary to improve the work environment for all employees, regardless of employment status, to develop affect-based commitment, which has positive attitudinal (job satisfaction) and behavioral (performance) consequences (Mayer & Schoorman, 1998).

Some researchers have argued that nonstandard work arrangements have a negative impact on those workers with standard arrangements, especially on work relationships and intentions to leave (see Broschak & Davis-Blake, 2006). Although we did not explore this phenomenon, we found that this firm did not suffer negative or dysfunctional psychological contracts as a result of employing contingent workers alongside permanent employees. An interesting future research direction would be to explore potential negative effects of contingent workers on permanent employees' levels of organizational commitment. Again, for managers, this study suggests a stronger focus on the development of relational aspects of the work environment, which is suggested to lead to OBSE and thus value commitment.

Limitations and Conclusion

Throughout this work, we sought to extend the existing research base on all three constructs as they relate to permanent and contingent workers as well as within the context of the high-tech industry. Our work has made contributions to the study of these constructs, although there were several limitations of this current research endeavor.

The first limitation was the potential lack of external validity. The host site for this study was a small technology firm. The employee makeup of this organization may not be representative of other technology firms or of firms in other industries. Although our data supported most of the hypotheses advanced in this study, there is no evidence that the results are generalizable across organizations or industries.

Second, there are methodological concerns, specifically with the selection process and sample size. Relying on self-selection for this survey of commitment and perceptions of obligations may possibly have elicited responses from those people most committed to the organization. Perhaps less committed workers may have elected not to participate in this exercise. Sample size was also a concern, although enough people responded to allow for comparison groups of adequate size.

Third, we did not consider a distal outcome, such as job performance or satisfaction. For example, an important distal outcome related to all of the constructs offered in this article is turnover, which is a concern of managers of dynamic organizational context, such as high-tech firms. We might have used length of service as a proxy for turnover; however, the sample was not conducive to doing so. We had length-of-service data available to us, but the firm was so young (3 years) that most of the workers had worked there no longer than 1 year, and most were hired within months of each other. Given the small sample size, cutting the data by length of service would not likely have yielded meaningful results. Although this was a limitation of this study, it is something to consider in future research. Broschak and Davis-Blake (2006) found a nonsignificant correlation between turnover intentions and time in service, but an important next step might be to study this distal outcome in relation to psychological contracts and commitment in firms that have been in existence longer than the one studied here.

Future research of these important organizational constructs should span a variety of organizations and industries to ascertain common effects and thus establish external validity. Additionally, experimental designs should be employed, and interventions administered, to observe and capture important effects in these variable relationships. Through the use of experimental research designs, the effects of psychological contract perceptions on performance behaviors may be mediated by the proximal outcomes of OBSE and organizational commitment.

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