Psychological Contract Breach, Job Attitude and Behaviours Across Cultures: A Meta-Analysis

Although research on psychological contract breach (PCB) has grown inrecent years, most of the studies have taken an individual-level perspective toexplain PCB effects on employee behavior, thereby overlooking the possibilitythat the national cultural context might affect employee responses topsychological contracts. This study, therefore, investigates whether employeesin various cultures react differently to psychological contract breaches.Drawing on the GLOBE cultural framework, we expected that nationalcultural practices moderate the relationship between PCB and a key workattitude (such as organizational commitment) and job behaviors (i.e. in-roleperformance, turnover intention, and counterproductive behaviours). Usingmeta-analytic data from 176 studies, we found that the results largely supportour hypotheses. The study updates and expands prior meta-analyses onpsychological contracts and opens a new area of inquiry by showing thatcultural practices at the national level can influence the processes of howpsychological contract breaches affect employee behaviors at the individuallevel.