부하에 의한 심리적 계약위반이 중간관리자의 정서적 몰입에 미치는 영향: 직무스트레스와 정서적 소진의 직렬다중매개효과를 중심으로

Recently, middle managers in the field have been experiencing increasing job burnout and stress, and their organizational commitment has been negatively impacted by the fact that they are performing tasks on behalf of their subordinates and taking on responsibilities at the same time, with the same workload and performance level in a limited amount of time. From the organization's point of view, the middle manager, a key agent for signing and maintaining psychological contracts, is struggling due to a psychological breach of contract in which the promises and obligations expected from organization members are not fulfilled. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the impact of psychological contract breach by subordinates on middle managers' organizational commitment and the serial multiple mediation effect of job stress and emotional exhaustion in the process. To verify the hypothesis, a survey was conducted on middle managers working at domestic companies, and a total of 361 data were used for analysis. In order to minimize the effects of common method bias, this study separated the measurement periods of independent and dependent variables in the survey, and reflected gender, age, marital status, length of service as a middle manager, type of work, team size, and psychological contract breach by supervisors as control variables. The results of the analysis showed that, first, psychological contract violation by subordinates had a negative effect on middle managers' emotional commitment. Second, there was no mediating effect of job stress between psychological contract breach by subordinates and emotional commitment. Third, emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between subordinate psychological contract breach and emotional commitment. Fourth, we found a serial multiple mediation effect of job stress and emotional exhaustion on the relationship between psychological contract breach by subordinate and emotional commitment. This study found that psychological contract breach by subordinates is an antecedent of emotional commitment in middle managers, which is significant because it reveals a negative mechanism by which psychological contract breach by subordinates leads to job stress in middle managers, which in turn leads to emotional burnout, which hinders emotional commitment. In addition, while many psychological contract studies have generally focused on employees' perceptions, this study is significant in that it extends the psychological contract literature by empirically examining the impact of subordinates' psychological contract breach on middle managers from the perspective of leaders as organizational agents. Based on these findings, the theoretical and practical implications of the study and its limitations were presented, and suggestions for future research directions were discussed.