Breaching volunteers’ ideological contract: exploring sources and reactions to psychological contract breach.

Psychological contract breach can be defined as the cognition that perceived promises have been broken, inciting affective responses, termed contract violation (Dulac, Coyle-Shapiro, Henderson, Wayne, 2008). While a tremendous amount of research focused on contract breach and violation (and their effects on outcomes), few to none examined this for volunteers. The ideological component of psychological contracts proposed by Thompson & Bunderson (2003) could offer an interesting point of view for studying this specific population. If volunteers indeed emphasize this ideological component, than two sources of contract breach unique to this contract form should become apparent: goal displacement (a shift from core ideals to administrative survival) and value interpenetration (the process by which relationships with other organizations introduces new values into the focal organization) (Thompson & Bunderson, 2003). We explored psychological contract breach of voluntary employees in the non-profit sector, using in-depth interviews based on the critical incidents technique. Respondents (N=30) were asked to recall examples of unfulfilled obligations to or by the organization, with an average of four incidents recorded per respondent. Next, elicited incidents were content-analyzed by expert judges. Results demonstrate that goal displacement is a major source of psychological contract breach. Reactions to contract breach are further illustrated and discussed. We conclude that the ideological contract form constitutes an important aspect of volunteers' psychological contracts.