2017 AOM Symposium Proposal
It's about time! Acknowledging the role of time in psychological contract processes
Our apologies for (potential) cross-postings.
Dear colleagues,
For decades, researchers have shown that psychological contracts (PCs)-i.e., employees' beliefs about their own and their organizations' obligations to one another-offer a powerful lens to understand employee attitudes and behaviors, such as organizational commitment, performance, counterproductive work behavior, and turnover intentions. The bulk of this research studied PCs from a between-person perspective, using concepts such as PC breach and fulfillment to explain, for example, why some employees perform worse than others. Despite the utility of such findings, we know little about the circumstances under which people will perceive a PC breach, the temporal nature of breach perceptions (e.g., immediate or delayed), or the dynamic nature of breach reactions over time.
More recently, there have been repeated calls to adopt a temporal lens in organizational research (Roe, 2008, Shipp & Cole, 2015; Sonnentag, 2012) and in PC research specifically. Numerous scholars have urged researchers to recognize the role of time in the study of PCs by focusing on within-person processes (Conway & Briner, 2002; Griep, Vantilborgh, Baillien, & Pepermans, 2016; Tomprou, Rousseau, & Hansen, 2015; Rousseau, Hansen, & Tomprou, 2016; Vantilborgh, Bidee, Pepermans, Griep, & Hofmans, 2016). A within-person process perspective emphasizes, for example, how the PC forms and changes over time, or how reactions to PC evaluations unfold and change over time. As a result, this perspective allows for more fine-grained answers to the fundamental questions of why, when, and how PCs shape employee attitudes and behaviors.
In light of the aforementioned calls, we plan to submit a proposal for a symposium on time and PCs for the 2017 Academy of Management meeting. This symposium will include theoretical and empirical contributions that involve a within-person perspective on PCs and/or incorporate time (either objective or subjective) as a meaningful variable in the study of PCs.
With this call, we aim to determine if there is interest in contributing to this proposed symposium. In addition to contacting specific individual scholars about their interest in contributing to this symposium, we are extending an open invitation to this list of potential contributors.
Some examples of possible research questions symposium presentations might address include:
· How is the PC formed and how does it change over time?
· How do employee reactions to PC evaluations, ranging from under-fulfillment to over-fulfillment, change over time?
· What are the individual and organizational factors that influence trajectories of reactions to levels of PC fulfillment?
· How do repeated perceptions of PC breach (or fulfillment) shape later employee reactions?
· How quickly do employees recover from PC breach?
· How often are PCs breached, fulfilled, or over-fulfilled?
· How are PC perceptions and reactions influenced by temporal constructs (e.g., temporal depth)?
If you have research that seems to fit well with topics such as those noted above, and you would like to participate in this symposium, please inform Samantha Hansen (shansen@utsc.utoronto.ca), Tim Vantilborgh (tim.vantilborgh@vub.ac.be), or Yannick Griep (yannick.griep@ucalgary.ca) of your interest as soon as possible (no later than December 14th, 2016). In your email, please provide a brief description of the research (e.g., purpose, method, analytic approach, results) and specify how you believe it is a good fit for this symposium. We will inform potential contributors as to whether their proposed presentation will be incorporated into the symposium by December 16th; this will provide scholars the time to find an alternate session for their paper should we not have enough space to include the work of all interested scholars.
For confirmed contributors, we ask that the *required* 2-5 page presentation synopsis be submitted to Samantha Hansen (shansen@utsc.utoronto.ca) no later than December 30th, 2017. This will allow us time to compose a strong symposium proposal, incorporating ideas from all presentations, and submit it to AOM by the deadline on January 10th, 2017. Each presentation synopsis must use 12pt Times New Roman font, be double-spaced on 8.5" x 11" pages with 1" margins all around and may include a maximum of two additional pages of tables and figures, which must be clear and legible (10pt font or larger).
Regards,
Samantha Hansen, University of Toronto Scarborough
Tim Vantilborgh, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Yannick Griep, University of Calgary
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Samantha D. Hansen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Management
University of Toronto Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M1C 1A4
Phone: (416) 208-4892
Fax: (416) 287-7392
Email: shansen@utsc.utoronto.ca
EAWOP Small Group Meeting on The Role of Time in Psychological Contract Processes, London, United Kingdom, November 3-4!
Check out the special issue call in Frontiers in Psychology: Unravelling the Role of Time in Psychological Contract Processes