Hi, need to submit a 1750 words paper on the topic Psychological Contracts in Organizations. After knowing about the psychological contract and understanding its effect on part-time as well as the permanent employees of a company, I feel that I am in a better position to apply the concept usefully and to study the implications of a negative turn on the psychological contract. The learning from the notes and research on psychological contracts also allows me to suggest ways in how a negative impact can be avoided or minimized.

Introduction

The central point which I came to notice about the two companies was that the cultures of the two organizations are vastly different. Company X was a traditional, bureaucratic and hierarchical company while Company A worked on the lines of a modern, fast-moving firm. From the research on the topic, it can be seen that this fact alone is likely to lead to a culture clash (Hendry and Jenkins, 1997). However, the situation was somewhat worsened by the fact that the owners of the new firm decided to create a talent and leadership program and sought employees who worked with the former Company X to join the program and lead the business into the future.

While the takeover itself certainly impacted the psychological contract, since as suggested by Garrow (2003), mergers or acquisition is one of the toughest storms a psychological contract has to go through. However, the process of identifying and selecting candidates for the new program had an even bigger impact. Even before the process began there were four categories of employees, who were expected to show an impact the eventual selection results, i.e.:

-Employees who wanted to and were selected.

-Employees who expected and wished to join the program but were not selected.

-Employees who were neutral about being in the program but were eventually selected.

-Employees who neither wished nor wanted to join the program but were selected.

Robinson and Rousseau (1994) suggest that the psychological contract in all of the cases given above would be impacted differently and this was certainly shown to be true.