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T he core responsibilities of most managerial positions include decision making with regard to people. Decisions must be made about who and how to hire, train, reward, discipline, and retain or terminate employees. These decisions take place in the context of an organization seeking to provide both an adequate return to shareholders and valued products and/or services to customers, and do so all within a broader political/legal context that is often uncertain. Ideally, decisions about people should consider all of the relevant constituencies, constraints, and potential outcomes, but increasingly such decisions seem to be influenced by legal considerations. Managers claim that the threat of litigation is a pervasive constraint on

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?Good Cause Beliefs? in an ?At-Will World?? A Focused Investigation of Psychological Versus Legal Contracts

Roehling

Boswell

2004

Employ Respons Rights J

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This study assesses the psychological contracts of a group of at-will employees and compares their relevant psychological contract beliefs with the terms of the controlling legal employment contract. In addition, we test specific hypotheses regarding the relationship between employers' formal job security policy (employment at-will vs. "good cause" protection, and employee personal characteristics; equity sensitivity, organizational tenure) to 2 focal psychological contract beliefs (the employer's obligation to have a good reason to discharge the employee, and the employee's reciprocal obligation to have a good reason to leave his/her employer). These issues are investigated using survey data sampled from 15 diverse U.S. organizations, and independently collected information regarding organizations' job security policies. The results provide evidence of a widely shared psychological contract belief that, despite explicit at-will policies, U.S. employers are highly obligated to have a good reason to discharge employees. Further, personal characteristics are more strongly related to the focal psychological contract beliefs than employer job security policies. The theoretical contribution of the study and its practical implications are discussed.

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Cited by 15 publications

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Individual job‐choice decisions and the impact of job attributes and recruitment practices: A longitudinal field study

Individual job‐choice decisions and the impact of job attributes and recruitment practices: A longitudinal field study

Organizationally sensible versus legal‐centric approaches to employment decisions

?Good Cause Beliefs? in an ?At-Will World?? A Focused Investigation of Psychological Versus Legal Contracts

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