Events

Because psychological contract breach is a subjective perception, individual differences should play an important role in understanding perceptions of breach. However, psychological contract breach studies have often focused on situational antecedents, with few directly investigating the role of individual differences. Among the few that investigate individual differences, there is inconsistency in selection of individual differences and often conflicting results. Thus, despite the intuitive link with individual differences, our knowledge of these relationships is piecemeal and conflicting. Based on the situation construal model, we hypothesize that individual differences in personality, trait affect, and equity sensitivity influence employees’ construal of events related to their psychological contracts, and thus impact breach perceptions. Further, drawing on affective events theory, we highlight counterproductive work behavior (CWB) as an outcome of breach. Meta-analyses of the relationships between individual differences, breach, and CWB; and meta-analytic path analyses based on the results, provide support for our mediation model. Individual differences predict breach perceptions (R =.34) and the combination of individual differences and breach perceptions strongly predict CWB (R=.62). This advances understanding of breach perceptions by highlighting the impact of individual differences and the role that breach perceptions play in explaining why individual differences are related to CWB.