Carol sager wrote:
> When people sign a job contract, they also sign a psychological
> contract (unarticlated, but there) which is often broken more
> regularly and consistently than the actual employment contract.
Speaken from practical point of view and from my own experience,
this argument is very valid. I would add that you sign not only a
psychological contract when you sign a job contract, but also when you
change job internally, switching to another department of the same
organization.
If things that were promised to you become not true, or if they
were completely wrong, it is very likely that you will become frustrated
and will dismiss. Sometimes you will stay in your job, but with an inner
dismissal your performance is very likely to drop, even if it may be true
that sometimes the organization does not demand more (especially in a role
culture of a bureaucratic organization).
I think it is a pitty that organization are not really aware of
such processes of demotivation, and now, especially in times of occuring
recession, many organization feel again powerful and think that it is not
necessary to care at all about such psychological contracts.
-- Wolfgang Schmid e-mail: ws2@student.open.ac.uk Compuserve: 100101.3210@Compuserve.com ($!!)company address: OMV AG Raffinerie Schwechat Mannswoertherstrasse 28 A-2320 Schwechat Austria/Europe
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>