In the summer of 2015, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015), Kim Davis, County Clerk for Rowan County Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples (Cheves 2015). Ms. Davis offered no legal challenge to the court’s ruling, nor did she argue that this task was outside of her official responsibilities. Rather, Ms. Davis cited personal beliefs against issuing marriage licenses to same sex individuals and stated that had she done so, it would have “forever echo[ed] in her conscience” (Liptak 2015). Ms. Davis’s actions illustrate how an employee’s psychological contract (i.e., the “beliefs that individuals hold regarding promises made, accepted, and relied on between themselves and another”, Rousseau 1995, p. 9) can dramatically influence an employee’s attitudes towards an employer and change an employee’s behavior on the job.

Although previous research has demonstrated the ubiquity of psychological contracts, it would not have predicted Ms. Davis’s reaction to this Supreme Court ruling. The study of psychological contracts has identified three types of employee expectations and has found evidence for two of these three in the psychological contracts of most employees: 1) economic considerations that include pay and benefits and 2) socioemotional considerations that include job security, professional development, and affiliation with a professional group (MacNeil 1985; Rousseau and McLean Parks 1993; Thompson and Bunderson 2003). In contrast, Ms. Davis’s refusal to provide marriage licenses to same-sex couples provides a clear example of a different type of expectation in her psychological contract: 3) ideological considerations that represent employees’ expectations that they will further a personal belief through affiliation with their employer (Thompson and Bunderson 2003). The literature on ideological beliefs in employee’s psychological contracts grew out of a study of members of professions and the values that they develop independent of their expectations of the company that employs them (Bunderson 2001; Cavanaugh and Noe 1999; Morrison and Robinson 1997). Subsequent empirical demonstration of ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts have only investigated specific professional and value laden contexts: specific types of organizations, primarily nonprofits (O’Donohue et al. 2007a) and organizations with “green” policies (Bingham et al. 2014); or specific types of workers, including volunteers (O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a) and degreed professionals (Bunderson 2001), including those in health care (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007; O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a), education (Bal and Vink 2011), and scientific research, (O’Donohue et al. 2007a). Like most employees, Ms. Davis is neither a volunteer nor part of a profession, and she works for an organization that focuses on providing services rather than adopting ideological positions. Thus, scholars would not have predicted that Ms. Davis would include ideological expectations in her psychological contract.

As prior research locates both the theoretical foundation and empirical demonstration of ideological expectations in psychological contracts exclusively in value laden organizations, positions, and professions, it leaves questions of generalizability unanswered. Do ideological expectations appear regularly in psychological contracts only when employees work as volunteers or professionals in nonprofits devoted to humane tasks such as teaching or medicine? Or, would nonprofessional employees working in a very different context, such as task-oriented activities in for-profit organizations, also include ideological values in their psychological contracts? For example, would blue-collar employees working in a corporate manufacturing environment expect their employment to further their participation in a cause or set of principles?

The absence of answers to these questions shows that scholars have gathered insufficient evidence to support any assertion that employees generally develop ideological expectations in their psychological contracts. Furthermore it gives rise to two questions. First, if only volunteers and professionals working in value laden contexts include ideological expectations in their psychological contracts, how should scholars circumscribe theory to accurately reflect these value laden contexts? Second, in contrast, if nonprofessional employees working on task-oriented activities in for-profit organizations do generally develop ideological expectations in their psychological contracts, what form do these ideological expectations take?

In this study, we explore the prevalence of ideological expectations of employees in the corporate manufacture of industrial equipment, a context with strong economic and socioemotional considerations and potentially few ideological considerations. Given the lack of research in this context regarding if and how expressions of ideology manifest in employees’ psychological contracts may occur, we base our analysis on an in-depth qualitative evaluation of employees’ responses to an open-ended question, a methodology typical of earlier studies in the field (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007; O’Donohue et al. 2007a; O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a). Our analysis shows not only that ideological expectations play a meaningful role in the psychological contracts of corporate manufacturing employees, but also that these ideological expectations manifest themselves in five distinct ways: 1) belief in a company’s espoused cause; 2) maintaining practices, policies, and culture that advance company ideals; 3) professional pride; 4) user well-being; and 5) efforts to benefit a third-party. These values provide a basis for clarifying the meaning of ideologically-based contracts and insights for practicing managers to consider when building employee engagement, motivation, and organizational commitment.

Theoretical Background

The Psychological Contract

History and Types of Currency in the Psychological Contract

The concept of the “psychological contract” has evolved considerably since management scholars began using the term over 50 years ago. Argyris (1960) introduced the term to the study of management in reference to the common agreement between a new foreman and the employees he supervises to maintain an established, informal culture in exchange for productive and agreeable workers (Argyris 1960; Roehling 1997). Since this initial formation, scholars have clarified that such a contract need not be recorded or even established in a fully cognizant manner; it operates at the level of the individual, not at the level of the group or even at the level of the relationship between the individual and the group (e.g. Rousseau 1995). In other words, employers and employees need not agree on the expectations in the psychological contract; neither do employees need to agree among themselves on these expectations. Theoretically, an employee could expect an employer to uphold values to which the employer has never ascribed. Though not legally binding, this psychological contract helps explain employees’ attitudes and behaviors, including their motivation to fulfill their end of the contract, their sense of entitlement to specific behavior from their employer, and their resentment when an employer fails to meet their expectations (Roehling 1997; Rousseau 1989; Rousseau and Wade-Benzoni 1994).

As noted above, economic and socio-emotional types of psychological contracts have received the most attention in the extant literature (Rousseau 1995; Thompson and Bunderson 2003). Importantly, a number of scholars have acknowledged that although an employee’s psychological contract might focus primarily on either economic currency or socioemotional currency, many employees integrate economic commitments with socioemotional commitments. Known as a balanced contract, this combination allows firms to adjust their commitments to employees in response to changes in the economy and expects employees to reconfigure their roles in the company by renegotiating their psychological contracts (Morrison and Robinson 1997; Rousseau 1995).

As the pace of business change accelerated at the end of the twentieth century and commitments between employers and employees became less certain, scholars noted that employees’ psychological contracts changed dramatically. Scholars began to examine not only the commitments that employees make to their employers but also those that they make to their professions that are separate from their personal self-interest (Bunderson 2001; Cavanaugh and Noe 1999; Morrison and Robinson 1997). Subsequently, in a careful examination of Blau (1964), Thompson and Bunderson (2003) brought to light that social exchange theory, the theoretical precursor to the psychological contract, actually relies on three types of exchange – a transactional exchange of economic currency, a relational exchange of socioemotional currency, and a covenantal exchange of ideological currency – and asserted that it provides a theoretical foundation for including ideological currency in the psychological contract.

According to Thompson and Bunderson (2003), an employee receives ideological currency when contributing to an organization allows the employee to further his ideological values. Studies clearly differentiate these ideological values from an employee’s expectations of direct material or socioeconomic benefit but stop short of circumscribing the ideological expectations that an employee might develop: an “ideologically infused psychological contract reflects a principled and externally oriented model of human nature, where the notion of benefit may transcend personal gain in the eyes of the employee” (O’Donohue and Nelson 2009b, p. 253). Organizations that provide value-laden products or services (e.g. religious organizations such as the Mormon Church, political organizations such as the Republican National Committee, or environmental organizations such as Greenpeace) present obvious opportunities for the exchange of ideological currency. Perhaps not surprisingly then, scholars have looked for evidence of this type of currency in a number of professions in which employees adhere to values inherent in serving a vulnerable group such as medical patients or students. Empirical investigations have shown the presence of ideological currency in the psychological contract of medical professionals (Bunderson 2001), hospital volunteer workers (O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a), registered nurses (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007), research scientists (O’Donohue et al. 2007a), and middle managers in education (Bal and Vink 2011).

Scholars have associated this type of psychological contract with a number of personal and organizational outcomes (e.g., increased loyalty, greater tolerance for an organization’s failings, and a personal sense of workplace meaning) that they have not associated with transactional or relationally-based contracts to the same degree (Thompson and Bunderson 2003). Several empirical investigations have largely supported these benefits: Bal and Vink (2011), for example, found that employees who perceived that their employer fulfilled ideologically-based expectations experienced a greater obligation to fulfill the organization’s mission and uphold it values. In a similar manner, Bingham et al. (2014) found that workers who were seen by others as fulfilling components of their ideologically-based contracts were also perceived to have greater organizational influence. The authors suggest that such employees may prove especially useful to managers and organizations who need to enlist “true believers” to realize organizational objectives – something that may prove increasingly rare in an era of greater employment mobility.

Elements of the Ideologically-Infused Psychological Contract

Although employees develop ideological expectations around distinct values, many of which relate to specific companies, industries, job descriptions, or professions, our examination of prior research revealed five common characteristics that apply across these individual differences. These characteristics often overlap, so a single expectation that an employee has of an employer could demonstrate more than one of the following characteristics:

  1. 1.

    Belief in a company’s espoused cause: The employee supports the organization’s primary mission or a portion of that mission that lacks an overt connection to profit motive and instead promotes a social cause (e.g., Bingham et al. 2014). Thompson and Bunderson illustrate this with the example of a Catholic-Jesuit hospital devoted to “pastoral care, community outreach, and treatment of underprivileged groups” (p. 572).

  2. 2.

    Maintaining practices, policies, and culture that advance company ideals: The employee supports those aspects of the organization that reinforce its espoused cause. (e.g., Bal and Vink 2011). Continuing with the example of the Catholic-Jesuit hospital described above, Thompson and Bunderson (2003) illustrate this characteristic by identifying the hospital’s nonprofit status as an organizational practice that allows it to maintain its commitment to meet the needs of underprivileged groups.

  3. 3.

    Professional pride: Employees dedicate themselves to excellence in performance, which may include values learned through years of training to obtain a license or degree (e.g., O’Donohue and Nelson 2007). Employees may link this pride to the company’s specific cause or to their profession in general. Quotes from prior research that illustrate professional pride include the following: “I’ve always believed in excellence in nursing and in professional development and it’s for the benefit of the patient really” (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007, p. 552); “Research scientists are [I am] entrusted by the community to understand and to pursue ideas that the general community have a lot of trouble coming to terms with” (O’Donohue et al. 2007a, p. 306).

  4. 4.

    User well-being: The employee expresses interest in the well-being of those who use the product or receive the service, especially when the end-user lacks the expertise to ascertain quality (Thompson and Bunderson 2003). Prior studies have shown that employees make such commitments to patients (Bunderson 2001; O’Donohue and Nelson 2007; O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a), to students (Bal and Vink 2011), and to the general public (O’Donohue et al. 2007a). Illustrative quotes from prior research include the following: “I just feel that… nurses are [you’re] there to provide high quality care for the patients to the best of our [your] ability” (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007, p. 552); “I think research scientists [you] have a responsibility to achieve… honesty and producing the best possible result” (O’Donohue et al. 2007a, p. 306).

  5. 5.

    Efforts to benefit a third party: The employee expects the organization to directly or indirectly support the ethical, moral, physical, mental, or spiritual well-being of individuals who are external to the organization. This group does not include those who use the company’s product, but may include a disadvantaged group such as “the poor” or “the American worker” (e.g., O’Donohue et al. 2007a; O’Donohue and Nelson 2007). Quotes from prior research that illustrate the effort to benefit a third party include the following: “I have been approached by outside organizations to do (health related) education sessions… it seemed easier to do it for my professional organization than it did for my actual employer” (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007, p. 552); “I am a publicly funded scientist and so I think I have a responsibility to the public and the public good” (O’Donohue et al. 2007a, p. 306).

Purpose of the Present Study

In light of its continual evolution over the past 50 years, we investigated an unexplored aspect of the psychological contract by analyzing employees’ ideological expectations in a corporate manufacturing environment. This corporate manufacturing context contrasts sharply in a number of ways with the environments examined in prior studies of ideological currency. First, we chose an organization that not only has employees instead of volunteers but also that has a reputation for paying competitive levels of compensation thereby allowing us to observe whether employees develop ideological expectations in the face of fulfillment of economic expectations. Moreover, we chose not only a publicly-traded company, but also a company whose management regularly articulates the importance of increasing profits. Second, we also selected a manufacturer of heavy industrial equipment that sells its products to customers who use these products to provide a service to end-users. This creates both a real and a metaphorical distance between employees and those who use its products, which allowed us to determine whether employees developed ideological expectations in the absence of contact with end users. Third, we chose a company that employs both white-collar degreed professionals and blue-collar workers, which let us examine differences, if present, in their expressions of ideological currencies.

In so doing, we sought to explore three questions. First, do employees in such an environment include ideological currency in their psychological contracts? Second, if employees in a for-profit corporate manufacturing environment develop ideological expectations, what values do they seek to further through their employment? Third, do professionals develop more or different ideological expectations than nonprofessional employees? Although all employees in our study – white and blue-collar alike – worked for a profit-driven organization and were removed from direct interaction with their clients, there was a great deal of variation between workers on dimensions such as education, training, and skills required to perform the work. To the extent that greater levels of education, training, and skill are connected with the development of professional values, which, in turn, have formed a basis for ideological currency in previous empirical investigations (Bal and Vink 2011; O’Donohue et al. 2007a; O’Donohue and Nelson 2007; O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a), we explored whether expressions of ideological currency differed between professional and manufacturing employees.

Method

Organizational Context

The large U. S. manufacturing organization where we conducted our research employed production workers, engineers, technical workers, and support staff. Many of the employees were represented by one of two unions (one representing professional workers, the other representing manufacturing workers) which had been historically quite active and successful in securing excellent wages and benefits for their members. The company was also known to offer extensive training and advancement opportunities to employees; pay was considered to be competitive, and, although health and pension benefits had declined in recent years, company benefits were frequently still viewed as better than those offered by other companies in the region. Many employees also viewed losses to their benefits as consistent with the wider trend in the United States of increases in employee-shouldered health care costs and decreases in employer-funded pensions. The company had also enjoyed many decades of industry leadership in terms of both product innovation and sales. In the immediate geographic region, this was a source of pride for employees and nonemployees alike. Together with the excellent wages and benefits, this reputation had made the company a highly desirable place to work, one where employees frequently referred to their coworkers and place of employment as “family.”

While elements of this heritage culture remained at the time of the study, a merger some 15 years prior had, by many accounts, significantly affected the organizational culture in several important ways. First, leaders from the outside organization assumed top managerial positions in the newly merged company. With them, these leaders brought a more profit-driven and less product-driven orientation; over time many employees began to question the company’s capacity to develop innovative and successful products. This was especially the case when a new product experienced a great number of setbacks in development and arrived to the market a number of years behind schedule. Top leaders also made the decision to outsource much more work than had previous leaders, and coupled with the decision to move the corporate office out of state and a number of contentious labor contract negotiations, many employees felt betrayed by what they perceived as a lack of loyalty to employees and to the region. The degree to which these changes impacted workers was profound: it was still quite common to hear employees speak with emotion about the company pre- versus post-merger at the time of this study’s data collection.

Participants and Procedure

We solicited employee participation through the company’s two unions: approximately 8000 white-collar members comprised of professional and technical workers and nearly 21,000 blue-collar members comprised of production workers. Via email, we invited union member employees to participate in an anonymous, on-line survey related to work attitudes and experiences. In our introductory email letter, we explained the focus of the research, our independence from both the unions and the company, and the amount of time subjects would need to complete the survey. In addition, we assured respondents that their responses would remain anonymous. Respondents were not offered compensation for their participation; instead we stressed the important role that employees’ responses had played in our previous research and dissemination of findings. Those who chose to participate clicked on an URL in the email which took them to the on-line survey. One week after our initial invitation to participate, we followed up with a reminder email.

We received responses from a total of 3665 employees: 2284 responses from blue-collar union members (an 11% response rate) and 1129 from white-collar union members (just below a 14% response rate). Due to missing demographic information that prevented us from categorizing some respondents as either a white or blue-collar employee, we eliminated 252 surveys. Drawing on the experience of survey companies who predict email survey response rates of 10–20% and academic surveys similar to ours, such as Rao and Pennington (2013) who achieved a response rate of 11.2%, we judge that our response rate falls within expectations.

As a partial examination of non response bias, we compared the percentage of men (84.5%) and women (15.5%) and the age distribution in our sample (mean = 49.77 years, SD = 11.8) to known demographic percentages of the union: the sample percentages were nearly identical to those of the union populations. The sample also contained good variability with respect to educational level (12.4% high school, 56.2% some college or associate’s degree, 17.0% bachelor’s degree, 14.4% graduate school or degree) and organizational tenure (mean = 15.8 years, SD = 12.3 years).

Materials

The data for this paper were collected as part of a larger study of the challenges that arise in an increasingly unpredictable, international, and changing workplace. The larger study contained a series of close-ended demographic questions and items related to the topics of workplace attitudes, experiences, and intentions. We avoided such direct, quantitative, closed-ended questions, however, when inquiring about employees’ psychological contracts. As prior research told us neither whether employees would have ideological currency in their psychological contracts nor how they might express it in a corporate manufacturing context, we chose not to reference the psychological contract or any aspects of the three types of currency that it contains. Rather, we adopted a less directed approach. At the end of the survey, we asked an unstructured, open-ended question that would elicit subjects’ expectations regarding their employer and allow us to observe their thoughts without imposing an agenda (Corbin and Strauss 2008): “In your opinion, what are the most important issues that face [name of company] as it moves into the future?” We followed this question with a text-box that allowed participants to type as much or as little as they wanted. We recognized that responses to this open-ended question would likely include discussion of topics of no relevance to the psychological contract. In addition, unlike questionnaires that require subjects to respond on a Likert-scale, this unstructured approach precluded us from quantifying an issue’s importance or to decisively state the percentage of respondents who held specific expectations in their psychological contracts. It did not, by contrast, presume a particular type of expression of ideological currency, or even its presence, that would be presumed in close-ended statements: such open observation was necessary to determine whether the phenomenon we sought existed in this environment so we could document it, categorize it, and prepare the groundwork that would permit future studies to develop hypotheses and more quantitative analysis. Slightly over 40% of participants (n = 1492 of 3665) responded to this open-ended question. Comparison of employees who did versus did not respond to this question revealed no significant differences in gender; however older, blue-collar employees were more likely to respond to this question. The effect sizes for these differences, however, were less than .5% in both cases.

Development of Coding Categories

In light of the limited prior empirical research on ideological currency, and the lack of empirical research on blue-collar employees in a profit-motivated, publicly-traded, corporate manufacturing setting, we developed our coding guidelines in a multistep, iterative process. Beginning with Thompson and Bunderson’s (2003) understanding of the three types of currency (i.e., economic, relational, and ideological) and the five characteristics of ideological currency that we described above, we coded each response to determine whether the comment contained ideological currency.

This process proved challenging: it required us to read beyond the explicit content of each comment (e.g. “managers”, “pay”, “new hires”) to infer the subject’s intent to determine whether it expressed ideological currency in the employee’s psychological contract. For example a comment about outsourcing production could indicate ideological currency: it might link work performed in-house to high quality work completed by degreed professionals, thereby expressing professional pride, one characteristic of ideological expectations (e.g. “Engineers and technicians are required in order to design and build a quality [product]. The outsourcing of critical design has caused the company serious development pains”). By contrast, a comment about outsourcing could bear no relation to ideological currency: for example, it might link outsourcing to loss of local employment opportunities, thereby expressing a fear of reduced wages or shorter employment horizons, key elements of economic and socioemotional currency (e.g. “Managers would like to outsource every job that pays above minimum wage”). Finally, a comment about outsourcing could be ambiguous: for example, a reference to outsourcing might equally well refer to high quality work completed by degreed professionals (ideological expectations) or to the potential loss of local jobs (economic or socioemotional expectations) (e.g. “[I’m concerned about whether the company will develop] A future in which we actually build [products] and not outsource everything”).

We took steps to address this difficulty in accurately representing subjects’ expectations of their employer. First, we developed three coding designations to match the three levels of certainty described above: (1) the statement clearly indicated ideological currency in the employee’s psychological contract; or (2) the statement made no mention of ideological currency in the employee’s psychological contract; or (3) the statement’s intent was ambiguous: the coder could equally well interpret the statement as an indication of ideological currency or as an indication of another type of currency (transactional or relational) in the employee’s psychological contract. Second, we refined the five characteristics of ideological currency that we identified in prior literature so that each articulated employees’ expectations in a corporate manufacturing environment. We coded 100 comments at a time, discussed our results, examined differences, and used these discussions to extend and refine our understanding of how employees express ideological expectations in a profit oriented, corporate manufacturing environment. After repeating this process six times and coding 600 responses, we achieved an acceptable level of agreement on this “training sample” (> 90%). The resulting description of the five general characteristics of ideological currency as manifested in this training sample is as follows:

  1. 1.

    Belief in a company’s espoused cause: Employees expressed a desire to harness technology and innovation to design and build high-performing products. Employees also expressed a commitment to maintaining the company’s long-standing history as the industry leader in the production of these products. Importantly, employees expressed this theme independently from the company’s profit-motive or the employee’s own economic gain. Rather, employees valued these ideals of excellence in and of themselves, demonstrating a deep-seated pride in the company’s history and product.

  2. 2.

    Maintaining practices, policies, and culture that advance company ideals: Connected to the first theme, employees mentioned numerous employment practices or company decisions that supported the company’s capacity to innovate, design, and build high-performance products. For example, comments related to outsourcing or hiring often invoked a deep, fundamental concern that was unrelated to profit (i.e., economic currency) or job security (i.e., socioemotional currency) and instead tied to concerns about decreasing product quality.

  3. 3.

    Professional pride: Employees valued and expected their employer to prioritize workmanship, work ethic, professionalism, and trade expertise. Employees valued these characteristics for their own sake and identified deeply with this self-image, independent of any economic or socioemotional benefits.

  4. 4.

    User well-being: Employees expressed concern for the well-being of those who would use the product and who likely would not have the expertise to evaluate the product’s risk of injury. This altruism appeared independent from any economic or socioemotional rewards.

  5. 5.

    Efforts to benefit a third party: Employees identified the company as an important economic or ethical influence on the local area or on the United States as a whole. These remarks articulated an obligation to “workers” not directly employed by the company (e.g., that ethical, competent, or principled governing of the company would result in improved economic health, opportunity, and well-being of workers in general, including those outside the company).

Third, we applied this newly revised set of five characteristics of employee’s ideological expectations in the psychological contract to the remaining 892 cases as our holdout sample to investigate the extent to which these employees expressed ideological expectations in their psychological contracts. We coded these last 892 cases independently, and in instances where we disagreed, a third rater, trained on subsets of the initial 600 statements used to develop coding categories, evaluated the comment to break the tie. As mentioned earlier, the five characteristics of ideological currency that we developed overlapped extensively and, accordingly, we did not code for each of these five characteristics discretely: rather we used these five characteristics to determine whether or not subjects’ comments indicated the presence of ideological expectations in their psychological contracts.

Results and Discussion

As mentioned previously, our goal was to elucidate the concept of ideological currency in employees’ psychological contracts in a corporate manufacturing setting. In so doing, we sought to understand whether (1) employees in a corporate manufacturing setting consistently include ideological currency in their psychological contracts and (2) if yes, the form and expression of such currency. We also examined (3) the prevalence of ideological currency as a function of white and blue-collar jobs, given that previous research has focused heavily on professional employees.

Interrater agreement for the 892 independently coded comments equaled 89%. For the 100 comments on which we disagreed, a third rater classified 74 of the remarks to align with one of the raters: the three coders achieved no agreement on 26 comments. Thus, we limit our results to the 866 comments on which at least two coders agreed, a total of 97.1% of all comments.

In response to our first question, regarding the presence of ideological expectations in a corporate manufacturing environment, we found that of the 866 comments, 313 (36%) were identified as containing an expression of ideological currency, with an additional 387 (44.8%) possessing a possible expression of ideological currency. Because these comments were in response to an open-ended question, unprompted to consider the psychological contract or an ideological basis for the employee’s connection to the organization, we speculate that these percentages may underestimate the degree to which ideological currency plays a role in employees’ psychological contracts.

In response to our second question, regarding the form in which employees expressed ideological expectations in a corporate manufacturing environment, we found evidence of each of the five characteristics of ideological currency in employees’ psychological contracts. To better articulate how ideological expectations differ from economic or socioemotional expectations, we present examples of all three types of expectations in relation to each of the five characteristics in our typology of ideology expectations in Table 1 and comment on each category below.

Table 1 Example quotes to illustrate Ideological, Socioemotional, and Economic Psychological Contract Currencies
Full size table

Belief in a company’s Espoused Cause

Although the company’s vision statement included principled goals (i.e. integrity, quality, safety, diversity, inclusion, corporate citizenship, and stakeholder success), the company had committed to a decidedly more utilitarian cause: to produce high-quality products. In a for-profit corporate atmosphere, salaried employees might focus exclusively on how they expected this production focus to influence their own economic or socioemotional status. As shown in Table 1, our subjects did express expectations about how the company’s production schedule imperiled employees’ physical and mental health (economic expectations) and their career trajectory (socioemotional expectations). Our subjects, however, also developed ideological expectations related to the company’s espoused cause, primarily in relation to producing quality products, independent from considerations of profit, job security, or other forms of personal gain. Furthermore, we found not only that employees articulated the value of producing high quality products, but that they often did so with a strong emotional undertone, suggesting that employees care a great deal about excellence in quality for its own sake. The majority of employee comments focused on the ways in which the company had violated these values. Employees expressed a commitment to reputation, excellence, and quality of production and a clear expectation that their employment would give them the opportunity to further these values.

Maintaining Practices, Policies, and Culture that Advance Company Ideals

In a for-profit company, we might expect employees to prioritize how the company’s practices, policies, and culture influence their own economic and socioemotional existence to the exclusion of their ideological expectations. Our subjects expressed such concerns, for example about how the company’s focus on metrics and lean production create safety hazards (economic expectations) and reduce career advancement opportunities (socioemotional expectations). However, employees also advocated for specific company practices, policies, and culture related solely to how these furthered their ability to engage in the production of high quality products. Employees articulated disappointment with management’s decision to forego innovation and a managerial culture that failed to support the production of quality products. Employees also voiced numerous expectations about personnel policies, including employee attrition, the selection and training of new workers, and the company’s perceived inability to transmit the unique product knowledge that employees had developed over many years of experience to new employees. These examples illustrate employees’ expectations that the company will maintain practices, polices, and culture that support the production of high quality products. Employees express clear disappointment that the company had violated these expectations.

Professional Pride

As employees worked in exchange for salary and benefits and were evaluated in relation to individual and team goals, we might expect them to comment on how professional values, skills, and behavior impacted their ability to achieve these goals and strengthen either economic or socioemotional returns from their employer. Our subjects expressed such concerns, for example how colleagues’ lack of work ethic lead to more work for the subject (economic expectations), or how management’s expectation that employees had no professional pride eroded the relationship with management (socioemotional expectations). However, employees also commented on the value of maintaining professional skills crucial to the design and production of quality products, independent from the impact on their personal work experience. These comments belie employees’ commitments, not to the company, but to specific professional skills and maintaining excellence in their professions. These comments also indicate that employees expected that the company would further those values.

User well-Being

As the company manufactured industrial equipment, employees producing those products had no opportunity to meet or interact with end users in the course of their work. As a result, employees might disregard user well-being. Moreover, as the production of industrial equipment presents serious health risks to workers, employees might focus exclusively on their own well-being and safety during the production process. We did identify employee concerns about their own health, both in the importance of creating a safe workspace (economic expectations) and through the disrespect communicated by maintaining an unsafe workplace (socioemotional expectations). Despite facing these daily challenges to their own well-being, employees also expected the company to prioritize the well-being of end users. Considering the lack of contact between employees and end users or the opportunity for employees to minister to their needs, these comments mentioned alongside other core values such as quality and benefits to others showed strong altruistic tendencies.

Efforts to Benefit a Third Party

In light of the company’s corporate, for-profit status and the company’s history of requesting business incentives from the local community (e.g. tax breaks) to compete against rivals, employees might have demonstrated a utilitarian attitude toward the local community. In other words, employees might have focused solely on how the region could support the company and employees’ livelihood. Surprisingly, no employee expressed the opinion that the region or other third parties should support the company in any way that would further its ability to fulfill economic or socioemotional commitments to employees. To the contrary, employees expressed their expectation that the company act in ways that would benefit local government, the economic health of the local economy, and American workers. When the company failed to fulfill these ideological expectations, employees often cited corporate greed as a possible root cause. These comments make clear employees’ expectations that the company will support third parties.

Finally, in response to our third research question, regarding both direct assertions (e.g., Bunderson 2001; Cavanaugh and Noe 1999) and implicit assertions (e.g., Bal and Vink 2011; Bingham et al. 2014; O’Donohue and Nelson 2007; O’Donohue et al. 2007b; O’Donohue and Nelson 2009a) that white-collar professionals develop different or more frequent ideological expectations in their psychological contracts than blue-collar employees, we found no differences between the two groups in either our quantitative or qualitative analyses. The rates of statement of clear expression of ideological currency between white-collar (40 of 137 comments =29.2%) and blue-collar (273 of 726 comments =37.6%) employees, or in the possible expression of ideological currency (white-collar, 71 of 137 comments =51.8%; blue-collar, 316 of 726 comments =43.5%) were not significantly different. Unexpectedly, we found that the rate of no ideological currency was identical between these two employee groups at 19% each. Furthermore, blue and white-collar employees expressed ideological expectations similarly.

Profit vs. Professionalism

  • White-collar: “(the company) should prioritize engineering rather than business”;

  • Blue-collar: “at the moment our leadership is more concerned about short term profits rather than focus on excellence as a company as well as the products we create”.

Outsourcing

  • White-collar: “<Company Name> needs to stop outsourcing its core competencies… and start treating its workers/engineers like the best assets they truly are.”

  • Blue-collar: “Via outsourcing and other methods <Company Name> is giving away the very technology that it needs to stay ahead of competitors.

Talent Loss

  • White-collar: “Brain drain as older employees leave without passing on tribal knowledge”;

  • Blue-collar: “aging work force combined with a ‘dumbbell’ curve age demographic creates a skill and knowledge gap that has not been addressed”

In summary, not only were the rates of ideological or possible ideological expression not significantly different between white and blue-collar employees, inspection of the actual remarks did not reveal any substantive difference in the nature of the ideological currency. They were, in fact, surprisingly similar given the varied nature of the work (i.e., manufacturing versus design).

Conclusion

Using an open-ended question, one that did not explicitly direct employees to consider whether or not they had an ideologically-based connection to the company or to their work, our study clearly revealed that employees in this manufacturing, for-profit organization, frequently included ideological expectations in their psychological contracts. Although we cannot say whether the subjects in our study did this more or less frequently than workers in other types of organizations, we found that such expectations played a noticeable and important role in the psychological contracts of both white and blue-collar employees. In addition, employees’ comments indicated that they connected the company’s fulfillment of these expectations to their levels of company commitment and job involvement. With some surprise, we observed all five of the ideological characteristics that we identified in prior literature. We also noted no difference in the ideological expectations on the psychological contracts of white-collar and blue-collar employees. These findings suggest that employees develop the same types of ideological expectations in their psychological contracts regardless of employment status (volunteer vs. paid), organizational status (for-profit vs. nonprofit), type of work (people-oriented helping tasks with direct human contact vs. task-oriented manufacturing of things), or prior training (professional vs. nonprofessional).

Limitations

Although our data demonstrated that it is possible for manufacturing employees working in for-profit organizations to have ideological currency in their psychological contracts, we acknowledge that these data are limited in a number of ways.

First, our findings were drawn from the response to a single item measure that was not answered by all respondents. It is possible that non response bias not only to the survey in general but also to this question in particular may have resulted in us receiving responses from employees with higher-than-average levels of engagement to their work, organization, and/or profession. To gauge the strength and prevalence of ideological currency in for profit manufacturing settings, we recommend that future researchers sample from other types of organizations (e.g., nonunionized) and also utilize quantitative measures, developed to recognize this broader understanding of ideological currency, so as to more precisely measure the relative strength the various types of currency at play in workers’ contracts.

Second, as shown by the large number of comments that we coded as “possible” ideological remarks (white-collar, = 51.8%; blue-collar =43.5%), we found that many topics, moreover, presented inherent difficulty in distinguishing between ideological currency and other types of currency in an employee’s psychological contract. This difficulty sprang both from the inability to determine the participant’s intent or greater meaning (e.g., comment was too brief) and in the appearance of multiple topics in multiple types of currency. Most commonly, we struggled to differentiate whether subjects’ comments about their employer referred to relational currency, ideological currency, or potentially both. For example, consider the following comment which contains elements of relational (i.e., job security) and ideological (i.e., production quality over meeting deadlines) concerns: “[The most important issue that the company faces is] Retaining High skilled employees, competing with other global companies. We really need to make a positive effort in ensuring Quality as job 1, even if it means a reduction in production. I have seen so many cases of missing deadlines because of quality lapses in the initial production process -- could be that the production metrics are put in front of quality?” As noted above, we see benefit in adding a more close-ended quantitative approach in future research; indeed, such an approach may lend itself to more readily classifying employees’ contracts or specifying the degree to which a given type of contract is held by an employee. At the same time, in light of our difficulty in categorizing expectations in employees’ psychological contracts as either relational or ideological, we caution against methodologies intended to measure these two types of expectations as distinct and separate phenomena. Rather, we encourage scholars to investigate the complex and multifaceted connections between different types of expectations in employees’ psychological contracts.

Third we exclusively sample from union members whose views may not necessarily represent the views of other manufacturing employees; they may be more attuned to issues of job security and organizational loyalty for example, and unions may do more to facilitate professional idealism as well as organizational expectations among their members. This organization also had a long-standing history that promoted innovation and pride in setting industry standards in the product; thus, to the extent that these employee and organizational features are uncommon in manufacturing settings, it is possible that our findings do not generalize well to all industries.

Despite these unique characteristics of our methodology and our research context, the responses we obtained and those collected in other studies of ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts present striking similarities. We acknowledge that any comparison of quotes is neither systematic nor exhaustive, however we present the following comparison to illustrate the surprising parallels (see Table 2). Comparing quotes from salaried employees producing industrial machinery in a corporate environment to those from volunteers or degreed professionals working in helping professions in nonprofit organizations reveals similarities in each of our five categories of ideological commitment. Both types of organization have a singular goal that creates value for others (i.e., espoused cause), and employees in both types of organization struggle to overcome economic constraints, strive to prioritize good quality work, and see managers as more of a hindrance than a help (i.e., maintaining practices, policies and culture that advance company ideas). Employees in both types of organization feel that managers disregard their expertise, struggle to overcome obstacles erected by managers, feel a diminished sense of loyalty, and believe that managers are more interested in advancing their own careers than eliciting good work from employees (i.e. professional pride). Employees in both environments also feel adamantly about providing a quality product or service (i.e., user well-being). Finally, employees in both contexts care about providing benefits to third parties with no affiliation to their organizations.

Table 2 Comparison of Expressions of Ideological Expectations: Current Study to Previous Research
Full size table

Implications and Future Research

Our findings fundamentally change the theoretical understanding of ideology in employee’s psychological contracts. This new perspective has implications for the future study of ideology in the psychological contract, the study of the psychological contract as a whole, and practicing managers’ efforts to motivate and build commitment in their employees.

First, our study changes the concept of ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts by demonstrating that these expectations need not emphasize altruism. Although Thompson and Bunderson (2003) initially defined ideological expectations in the psychological contract more broadly as “invok[ing] a principled or altruistic model of human nature”, they never articulated any principles other than altruism. Consequently, subsequent research has taken a narrower focus, leaning heavily on altruism and largely ignoring other principled models of human behavior. This emphasis on altruism in employees’ psychological contracts has included ideological values in relation to “socially responsible practices or programs” (Bingham et al. 2013), community service, environmental protection, the values of the U.S. Armed Forces (Bingham 2005), “green” company policies (Bingham et al. 2014), educational pedagogy (Bal and Vink 2011), volunteers caring for patients (O’Donohue and Nelson 2007), and nonprofit organizations engaged in healthcare (Vantilborgh et al. 2014). Our study shows clearly that employees include non altruistic ideological expectations in their psychological contracts, such as producing quality products, maintaining professional skills, and preserving the company’s position as the industry leader. In this manner, our study realizes the broader range of ideological models of human behavior that Thompson and Bunderson (2003) originally theorized.

Second, our study changes the context in which scholars would expect to find ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts. In contrast with assertions that employees develop ideological commitments through years of training to earn membership within a profession (Bunderson 2001), our study shows that non degreed employees develop ideological commitments outside of such training. In contrast with assertions that employees maintain ideological commitments in order to comply with standards enforced by professional boards (e.g. state medical boards or bar associations) (Bunderson 2001), our study shows that employees hold themselves to professional standards independent of such oversight. In contrast with assertions that volunteers develop ideological expectations to compensate for a lack of economic compensation or aspirations for status and promotions (Vantilborgh et al. 2014), our study shows that salaried employees in organizations that provide opportunities for promotion and advancement also develop ideological expectations. In contrast with assertions that employees develop ideological expectations in response to their employer’s commitments to social values (Bingham 2005; Bingham et al. 2014), our study shows that employees develop ideological expectations in companies whose only commitment entails providing products and services to customers. And, in contrast with implications that employees develop ideological commitments in human-oriented roles where they minister directly to an individual’s’ needs (O’Donohue et al. 2007a), our study shows that employees who never meet or interact with an end user develop ideological commitments to those end users’ safety and well-being. The presence of ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts independent of these previously hypothesized contextual drivers suggests that more individual and personal factors, such as Thompson and Bunderson’s (2003) discussion of calling, could drive this phenomenon.

Our observation that ideological currency takes many forms and appears in varied employment contexts, underscores that the content of the currency, per se, is less important than is the meaning that the employee imbues in that content. Although ideologically-based contracts could occur more frequently among employees in certain environments (e.g., health care) than in others (e.g., manufacturing), our findings illustrate that the work setting does not determine the presence or absence of ideological currency in employees’ psychological contracts. These findings highlight a fundamental, definitional characteristic of psychological contracts: they are the individual’s beliefs—beliefs which need not be grounded in the actual promises made by the organization nor in values held by leaders of that organization (Rousseau 1995). Our findings create the opportunity to ask what type of organizational and personal characteristics give rise to one type of currency over another? Over the course of a worker’s time with an organization, does ideological currency wax and wane? If so, what are the variables that affect such changes? And to what extent do certain work environments influence their development?

Third, our study changes the methodology that some studies use to investigate ideological currency in employees’ psychological contract. Specifically, our findings suggest that close-ended items that require numerical responses on Likert scales need to inquire about non altruistic ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contracts. We note that in previous research, scholars (e.g. Bingham et al. 2014) have used surveys that inquire about employees” cause-related ideological expectations but not employees’ production-related ideological expectations.

Fourth, our study changes investigation of the psychological contract in general. To date, the majority of research on the psychological contract has focused on employees’ economic expectations and relational expectations: the majority of research has not discussed employees’ ideological expectations. To the extent that scholars only anticipated finding ideological expectations in employees’ psychological contract in specific value laden contexts (e.g. volunteers, professionals, organizations with commitments to social values, etc.) outside of these value laden contexts, scholars could expect to develop accurate models of human behavior by investigating only employees’ economic and relational expectations. Our findings suggest that employees could develop ideological expectations in their psychological contracts in many environments and that scholars could better model employees’ thoughts and behaviors in all contexts by investigating all three types of expectations in the psychological contract: economic, relational, and ideological. This study of all three types of expectations in employees’ psychological contracts opens opportunities to understand interactions between fulfillment of different types of expectation. For example, are contracts that fulfill all three types of expectations more resilient than those that only fulfill one or two types of expectations? Similarly, can meeting one type of expectation in an employee’s psychological contract extremely well compensate for failing to meet another type of expectation? Previous scholars (e.g., Rousseau 1995; Morrison and Robinson 1997) have commented that contracts with such varied currencies may permit employees more facility in reframing their contracts in response to organizational and broader economic changes.

Fifth, our findings have important implications for management practices. As employees develop ideological expectations in their psychological contracts in a variety of environments, independent from the contextual factors described above, managers can better attract, retain, and motivate employees by fostering certain types of ideological expectations in employee’s psychological contracts and fulfilling the ideological expectations that employees develop. Specifically, our research suggests that managers would benefit from fostering ideological expectations regarding the production of quality products, following proper production methods, passing down tribal knowledge, and maintaining industry leadership. Fulfilling these ideological expectations creates a synergy that simultaneously increases employee commitment and the employer’s prospects for success. Moreover, our research suggests that managers who prioritize the company’s financial goals at the expense of meeting employee’s ideological expectations regarding quality, appropriate production methods, and industry leadership might not only violate employees’ expectations but also jeopardize the human capital necessary to achieve the financial results that the company seeks.

Concurrent with this practical application, we believe that the field would benefit from a more thorough understanding of contract types and their connections to important individual and organizational outcomes. This has received limited attention in the extant literature (e.g., Thompson and Bunderson 2003). To our knowledge, only Bingham et al.’s (2014) investigation of the relationship between ideological currency and an individual’s organizational influence has touched on this topic. In our study, limited anecdotal evidence suggested that violations of ideological expectations resulted in employee disengagement and fewer organizational citizenship behaviors; however, the types of reactions varied considerably, including decreased willingness to work overtime, reduced work effort, diminished creativity, as well as increased emphasis in professionalism as a type of “substitute” for organizational loyalty. Given the important organizational and individual consequences associated with such contracts, understanding their development and modifications could benefit researchers and practitioners alike.

In sum, our findings create opportunities for scholars to develop new methodologies to investigate ideological expectations in employee’s psychological contracts, to study them in a wider variety of settings, to further revise this theoretical concept, to add nuance to the study of the psychological contract in general, and to develop more robust and reliable models of how employees’ beliefs about promises made by their employers relate to employee behavior.