Counterproductive work behavior in social enterprises: Volunteers' and paid workers' reactions to (a lack of) psychological contract fulfillment.

Scholars--conducting research in the for-profit sector--agree that counterproductive workbehavior (CWB) is instigated by low levels of psychological contract fulfillment, as the latter is characterized by cognitions of disparity (i.e. a perceived mismatch between promised and delivered organizational inducements). As a result, feelings of violation develop as an emotional and affective reaction of outrage. In order to vent and express one's feelings of violation, individuals engage in CWB. In this paper, we focus on how various degrees of psychological contract fulfillment relate to violation, which in turn relates to CWB-O and CWB-I among volunteers as well as among paid employees. Mplus 7 was used to estimate a moderated mediation model with bootstrapping to analyze data from five social enterprises active in the North-South collaboration. The results indicated that fulfillment of the psychological contract was negatively related to violation. Violation, in addition was positively related to both CWB-O and CWB-I. The type of employment relationship moderated these relationships in such a way that paid employees experienced more violation in times of low psychological contract fulfillment and report higher levels of CWB-O and CWB-I than volunteers. Finally the conditional indirect effects of fulfillment on CWB-O were significant, while the conditional indirect effects of fulfillment on CWB-I were only marginally significant for both paid employees and volunteers. Although both paid employees and volunteers engage in CWB-O and CWB-I, our results indicate that paid employees who reported low levels of fulfillment, experienced higher levels of violation compared to volunteers, which in turn was positively related to reporting more CWB-O and CWB-I. Despite a number of limitations, our results have identified a preliminary chain of cognitions and emotions, explaining why individuals engage in counterproductive and deviant behavior. By unraveling this sequence, we unveil how the management of social enterprises can target interventions