심리적 계약이 창의성 및 과업성과에 미치는 영향: 교환 이데올로기의 조절효과

The exchange relationship between employees and their employer is an important aspect ofdetermining their attitudes and behavior. Psychological contract is a major analytical device ortopic in explaining social exchange relationships. In the past decade, a great deal of research hasbeen performed on employee responses to fulfillment and breach of the psychological contract. In the meantime, creativity is the one of the most frequently mentioned terminology in thesedays. Creativity is important in business because it is what propels a business from being onlyaverage to being outstanding, which gives competitive advantage to organizations. Therefore,many organizations has been tried to boost their social and economic outcome by fosteringinnovation and enhancing members’creativity. Although there has been a great deal of theempirical work to deal with creativity, little research has examined the effect of psychologicalcontract in predicting it. As a number of research studies have been focused on the connectionbetween social relationships and creativity, it is worthwhile to find out the impact of fulfillingthe psychological contract on creativity. Secondly, the existing literature is limited to the influence of the psychological contract onemployees’ attitudes and behavior. Especially, relatively little empirical research has addressedthe effects that the psychological contract fulfillment can have important effects on the taskperformance in Korea. That’s why we examine its effects on the task performance. Individual differences, such as exchange ideology has a considerable impact on relationshipsbetween perceptions of the situation and response to it. Results of the previous studies showthat the relation between independent variables and dependent variables is greater for employeeswith a strong exchange ideology than those with a weak ideology. And these findings supportthe social exchange viewpoint that employees' commitment to the organization is strongly influenced by their perception of the organization's commitment to them. Therefore, the third purpose ofthis study is to examine the moderating effect of exchange ideology on the relationship betweenemployee perceptions of psychological contract and two dependent variables. Results based on a sample of 255 employee-supervisor dyads indicated that the psychologicalcontract was positively related to creativity and task performance. And the influence of thepsychological contract on creativity and task performance is stronger for individuals with highexchange ideology than for those with low exchange ideology. The implications of this study’s results are like the following. First, this study empiricallyproved and analyzed the role of the psychological contract on creativity. Second, we supportedand extended the findings from previous researches about the relationships between thepsychological contract and employees’ attitudes and behavior. Lastly, this study encourages amore detailed investigation into the role of exchange ideology in organizations. A similar influenceof the psychological contract fulfillment on creativity and task performance for individuals withhigh and low exchange ideology suggests that management should consider the exchange ideologyas an important indicator when enhancing creativity and trying to achieve better performance. Despite its contribution, our research also has several areas including limitations that needto be addressed in future studies. First, a sample of this study is not directly related to the onewhich requires creativity. Second, cross-sectional questionnaire survey made it hard to managethe inevitable ambiguity. In other words, cause and effect relationships are not certain. So futurestudies may utilize aspects of the longitudinal or experimental research. Third, our study appliesthe psychological contract as a single independent variable. As there are several types of thepsychological contract such as transactional, relational, and balanced one, future research mayseek to investigate how different psychological contracts affect dependent variables within a fieldsetting. Fourth, we choose the exchange ideology as moderator. However, the exchange ideologyis not the only variable that represents the individual differences. So it may be the case thatincluding equity sensitivity as a moderator could allow future researchers to undercover arelationship between the psychological contract and dependent variables. Fifth, some mediatorslike positive affirmation are considered to make this study refined. Finally, many organizationshave turned to team-based work systems to increase their creativity. Therefore, next researchmay use other levels to explain workplace creativity at the team and the organizational level.