Untangling Employee Loyalty: A Psychological Contract Perspective

Jeffery A. Thompson

117 citations0/0 files storedBusiness Ethics Quarterly

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Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior Customer Service Quality and Loyalty Ethics in Business and Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Although business ethicists have theorized frequently about the virtues and vices of employee loyalty, the concept of loyalty remains loosely defined. In this article, we argue that viewing loyalty as a cognitive phenomenon—an attitude that resides in the mind of the individual—helps to clarify definitional inconsistencies, provides a finer-grained analysis of the concept, and sheds additional light on the ethical implications of loyalty in organizations. Specifically, we adopt the psychological contract perspective to analyze loyalty's cognitive dimensions, and treat loyalty as an individual-level construction of perceived reciprocal obligations. Based upon this perspective, we present a three-tiered framework of loyalty that provides a psychologically informed definition of the concept, specifies the variety of obligation types that loyalty can imply, and anticipates the potential for asymmetrical loyalty configurations between employers and employees. We use the framework to articulate moral issues associated with both symmetrical and asymmetrical loyalty configurations and discuss the implications of the framework for theory and practice.

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References

2017Exchange and Power in Social Life 1965Exchange and Power in Social Life.1970Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.1991A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment 1965Inequity In Social Exchange 1958Social Theory and Social Structure 1986Perceived organizational support.1988Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome.

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