An employee–employer relationship gone bad? Examining the double-edged effect of psychological contract violation on employees' helping behaviors

Abstract

An important concept that depicts the nature of employee–employer relationship is the psychological contract. Prior research has argued that all forms of extra-role behaviors suffer once employees' psychological contracts are violated. Helping behaviors are a specific form of extra-role behaviors that may suffer due to psychological contract violation. We argue that this predominantly negative relationship between psychological contract violation and helping behaviors is because the literature has not adequately examined the different types of helping behaviors. Using the latent moderated structural equation approach with multiwave and multisource data from a survey of 269 full-time employees and their coworkers from the hospitality industry in Ghana, we show that psychological contract violation is positively related to reactive helping behaviors and negatively associated with anticipatory helping behaviors through anticipatory anxiety.