a study of the coevolution of newcomers' psychological contracts and social networks

My thesis examines how employees’ psychological contracts form and evolve over time conjointly with their social network ties. It comprises three separate papers, one conceptual and two empirical, written with the purpose of capturing the antecedents of psychological contracts through pre-entry expectations and social relationships of newcomers. Paper 1 is a conceptual piece that theorizes the concurrent formation of newcomers’ social relationships and psychological contracts from a sensemaking perspective. I develop propositions explaining how newcomers make sense of information they gather from pre-entry to post-socialization. The key contribution of this paper is the establishment of a testable two-way process model, which captures the dynamic nature of psychological contracts, and how and why social relationships are important building blocks of the psychological contract. Paper 2 is a qualitative empirical study that investigates the pre-entry expectations and content dimensions of millennial employees’ anticipatory psychological contracts. The key contribution of this paper is the conceptualization of pre-entry time in the psychological contract formation process. The importance of pre-entry expectations in shaping employees’ initial psychological contracts are conceptually acknowledged but widely overlooked in empirical studies. This qualitative study empirically investigates pre-entry expectations and role of these in shaping the content dimensions of anticipatory psychological contracts, which guide millennials’ behavior and sensemaking once they join the organization. Paper 3 is a quantitative empirical study that examines the mechanisms of homophily and assimilation driving the coevolution of newcomers’ psychological contract formation and social network ties. This study challenges earlier views of the unidirectional influence of social interactions on the psychological contract. As a key contribution, through introducing a novel simulation methodology (SIENA), this study shows psychological contracts are both the products and predictors of employees’ social network ties.