THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT: A CURRENCY ABUSED IN THE LEBANESE BANKING SECTOR

Over the past two decades, the interest in the concept of psychological contract breach (PCB)
within both the academic and practitioner literature has been rapidly increasing. The topic
of the PCB has developed to become a strategic objective for the organizational behavior
specialists. This thesis aims to explore the role that change management can play over the
psychological contract breach in the world of money and numbers like the banking sector to
fulfill the requirements of the Staffordshire University’s Doctor of Business Administration.
Through a systematic review of relevant literatures of change and PCB, the researcher
highlights important change-PCB interfaces and proposes a newly synthesized conceptual
model, the change-PCB value chain, which captures the PCB themes and strategy.
The researcher had been a banker for more than three years when change management in the
form of complying was introduced in Lebanon and has witnessed organizational and
managerial problems regarding trust, commitment and careerism of employees (Rousseau,
1998). The Change-PCB value chain and its embodied proposition were evaluated within
the context of five cases studies operating in the banking sector of Lebanon, a country which
is witnessing high compliance procedures since the introduction of FATCA. The main
objective of this research is to investigate the outcomes that cause breaches in the
psychological contract amongst employees who experience continuous imposition of
change. It approaches this by critically reviewing the psychological contract theory and
through identifying how compliance with the change may affect the psychological contract
and finally by creating a conceptual model that proposes the role of change on PCB.
For every case study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a wide range of top
managers in addition to other stakeholders, as well as using secondary data that are related
to the examined phenomenon. Empirical findings revealed that the success of failure in
implementing change management plays a role over the PCB of employees in terms of trust,
commitment and careerism. The plausible explanation for the role of change on PCB was
thus identified and the factors affecting this role were discussed. This research contributes
to knowledge through presenting the conceptual model which uncovers the role of change
on the PCB.