The Influence of Employee Affect on Leader-Member Exchange and Perceptions of Psychological Contract Violation

This research investigated employees' psychological dispositions of positive affect, negative affect, and cynicism as potential influences upon their perceptions of psychological contract fulfillment or violation. Leader-member exchange (LMX) was hypothesized to serve as a partial mediator of the relationship. Prior research has focused mainly on direct relationships between various personality variables and either LMX or psychological contract violation; none have yet examined LMX as a potential mediator. A model of these proposed relationships was developed based on theory drawn from the areas of social psychology, LMX, and psychological contracts. Survey data was gathered from 278 respondents across five organizations and structural equation modeling was used to examine the strength of the relationships in the proposed model. While positive affect and negative affect were found to significantly relate to both LMX and the perception of psychological contract violation, LMX was not found to function as a mediator of the relationship. Employee cynicism was not significantly related to LMX and only weakly related to perceptions of psychological contract violation