Qualitative Study On The Foundations Of The Existance Of The Employees’ Psychological Contract. The Case Of The Romanian Automotive Industry

The concept of psychological contract (PC), which describes the promises that play the role of obligations within the employment relation, has become during the last thirty years a major analysis tool in the organizational behaviour field. However, it has been mainly used, almost exclusively, in North-American or British organizational contexts. Only recently the researches on the psychological contracts have turned towards other parts of the world such as China, Southern America or India. Despite this opening towards new horizons, the Eastern European countries mainly remain unexplored from the psychological contract perspective. Certain well-known researchers (for example Rousseau and Coyle-Shapiro) have even stated that the psychological contract simply doesn’t exist in this part of Europe. The present study which represents a part of the author’s doctoral thesis, demonstrates the opposite. Thus, our field research carried out in 2010 in two companies of the automotive industry in Romania on a sample of 31 participants, led us to conclude that the psychological contract is present in this country, too. By using a qualitative methodological approach inspired from the grounded theory, we have been able to notice that the foundations of the existence of the psychological contract are present in the analyzed sample. First of all, the employees benefit from contractual freedom, which allows them to negotiate the terms of their psychological contract and to begin or get out of an employment relation if it becomes unsatisfactory. Secondly, the employers benefit from a lot of flexibility when presenting the terms of the psychological contract to their employees. These two elements are derived from the market economy which is now being built in Eastern Europe and represent a significant change as compared to the employment relation characteristic to the centralized economy. Finally, our survey allowed us to seize, in the analyzed employment relation, the presence of two other elements sine qua non of the existence of the psychological contract in Romania, respectively the mutuality and the reciprocity. Anyway, our study led us to the conclusion that the psychological contract theory is relevant when it comes to analyzing the employment relation in this country. However, if the psychological contract principles can be applied and function properly in this context, other profound analyses are necessary in order to understand the characteristic features of the employer-employee relation in Romania.