Testing Conceptual Relationship Between Constructs of Psychological Contract Breach and Organizational Identification through Perceived Organizational Membership

A B S T R A C T This study examines the relationship between psychological contract breach and organizational identification, which include a group-level transformational and transactional leadership and routine justice in the hypothesized model. Result shows psychological contract breach to mediate the impact of transformational and transactional leadership is on organizational identification. Results further provided support for moderated mediation and showed that the indirect effects of transformational and transactional leadership on identification through psychological contract breach were stronger for employees with a low connection self-schema. This research has presented the importance of psychological contract breach for employees’ identification with their organization, as well as the key role of leadership and individual differences for understanding this relationship. Organizations that wish to further strong relational ties with their employees need, therefore, to take those variables seriously into account in their implementation of management practices. Trust is an important investigative variable that can offer additional perceptions on the employee-organization relationship and perceived organizational membership, it to be a mediator between breach and organizational identification. Finally, other individual variables could be included in the model as additional descriptive constructs.

Key words: Perceived organizational membership, organizational identification, psychological contract breach, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, routine justice, self-concept