Serving the Cause When My Organization Does Not: A Self-affirmation Model of Employees’ Compensatory Responses to Ideological Contract Breach

Abstract

Transactional and relational contract breach occur when organizations fail to deliver on promised personal benefits for employees and are associated with negative behaviors reciprocating such mistreatment. However, recent research suggests that ideological contract breach, a unique form of contract breach, may yield constructive behaviors because it is not organizations’ direct personal mistreatment of employees, but organizations’ abandonment of a valued cause to benefit a third party. Such an interesting prediction goes beyond the dominant social-exchange framework, which mainly forecasts destructive responses to breach. In this research, we develop a novel self-affirmation model to explain how ideological contract breach results in counterintuitive positive outcomes. In a hospital field study among medical professionals (N = 362) and their supervisors (N = 129), we found that ideological contract breach induces employees’ rumination about the breach, which in turn prompts them to self-affirm core values at work. This self-affirmation eventually spurs proactive serving behavior and self-improvement behavior to compensate for the breached ideology. Professional identification enhances this self-affirmation process.