Organizational Behaviour Comportement Organisationnel

implications of psychological contract within the context of unmet expectations, contractviolations, or perceptions of breach in the employment relationship (see Rousseau & Tijoriwala,1998). Thus, linking organizational commitment and employees’ perceived obligations tomotivational process variables fills a gap in the literature, and provides us a way to evaluate thesimilarity or distinctiveness of the two attachment concepts.The vast majority of studies that have examined motivational processes have focused onhow situational events or factors (e.g., assigned performance goals, feedback and reward systems,social stimuli) affect the cognitive mechanisms (e.g., intentions or personal goals, perceivedreward contingencies, perceived norms) that drive behavior (for a comprehensive review of themicro-level motivation theories, see Mitchell, Thompson, & George-Falvy, 2000). More recently,research in work motivation has started to move beyond situational determinants and look at howdispositional variables such as personality traits impact the cognitive-motivational “machinery”that regulates and controls human action (see Barrick, Mount, & Strauss, 1993; Gellatly, 1996).In this study we attempt to push further and test whether the nature of one’s attachments to his orher organization impact criterion-relevant intentions and normative perceptions that play a role indirecting and energizing behavior.Our focus is on turnover intentions and normative perceptions in several criteriondomains (absenteeism, organizational citizenship behavior/contextual performance, and taskperformance). There is some precedent for this direction in the broader organizational behaviorliterature. A consistent finding, across situations, is that the relationship between affectivecommitment and turnover is mediated by a cognitive process variable, turnover goals orintentions (see Tett & Meyer, 1993), and we also see that violations of the psychological contractare associated with turnover intentions (e.g., Turnley & Feldman, 1999). The links to normativeperceptions are less clear. Nicholson and Johns (1985) identified the psychological contract asplaying a key role in shaping the nature of the absence culture, and, in theory, the nature of thepsychological contract, and how this impacts an alignment of personal and organizational goals,should affect normative perceptions that drive absenteeism behavior (e.g., Gellatly & Luchak,1998; Harrison & Shaffer, 1994; Martocchio, 1994). What is not known is the relative role oftransactional versus relational obligations in shaping absence norms, nor do we know if measuresof organizational commitment are linked to normative perceptions. Finally, it is not clear whetherthese links to absence norms extend to the perceived norms that govern other criterion behaviors,such as OCB (Organ & Paine, 1999) or contextual performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993),and task performance (Feldman, 1984; Hackman, 1992).Thus, to the extent that measures of affective commitment, normative commitment, andrelational obligations all reflect socio-emotional attachments to the organization, we expect thatall three measures will correlate negatively with turnover intentions, and positively withattendance norms and performance norms. Conversely, the common rational-economic bases forcontinuance commitment and transactional obligations, and a few studies showing weak negativerelations with performance criteria (see Meyer et al., 2002; Irving & Gellatly, 2001), suggest thatboth of these variables will correlate with the motivational process variables the same way(negative). However, the following hypotheses should be considered exploratory given the lackof empirical precedent.Hypothesis 4: Measures of affective commitment, normative commitment, and relationalobligations will correlate negatively with turnover intentions, and positively withmeasures of attendance norms, contextual-performance norms, and task-performance143