Coping and laughing in the face of broken promises: implications for creative behavior
| Pages | 993-1014 |
| Date | 18 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-11-2018-0441 |
| Published date | 18 November 2019 |
| Author | Dirk De Clercq,Imanol Belausteguigoitia |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
Coping and laughing in the face
of broken promises: implications
for creative behavior
Dirk De Clercq
Goodman School of Business, Brock University, St Catharines, Canada, and
Imanol Belausteguigoitia
Centro de Desarrollo de la Empresa Familiar,
Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Mexico City, Mexico
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to consider how employees’perceptions of psychological contract
breach, due to their sense that their organization has not kept its promises, might diminish their creative
behavior. Yet access to two critical personal resources –emotion regulation and humor skills –might buffer
this negative relationship.
Design/methodology/approach –Survey data were collected from employees in a large organization in
the automobile sector.
Findings –Employees’beliefs that their employer has not come through on its promises diminishes their
engagement in creative activities. The effect is weaker among employees who can more easily control their
emotions and who use humor in difficult situations.
Practical implications –For organizations, the results show that the frustrations that come with a sense of
broken promises can be contained more easily to the extent that their employee bases can rely on pertinent
personal resources.
Originality/value –This investigation provides a more comprehensive understanding of when perceived
contract breach steers employees away from productive work activities, in the form of creativity. This
damaging effect is less prominent when employees possess skills that enable them to control negative
emotions or can use humor to cope with workplace adversity.
Keywords Quantitative, Conservation of resources theory, Creative behaviour, Emotion regulation skills,
Humor skills, Perceived contract breach
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
When employees operate in adverse, resource-depleting work environments, they exhibit
lower work motivation and engage in fewer productive work behaviors (Coelho et al., 2011;
Hobfoll and Shirom, 2000; Jamil et al., 2013; Perko et al., 2017). Such workplace adversity
might result from the belief that an employer has broken its psychological contract with
them –that is, the implicit agreement about the obligations that the employer has toward
them (Rayton and Yalabik, 2014; Robinson and Rousseau, 1994; Sonnenberg et al., 2011).
A psychological contract breach can become manifest in different ways, such as when
employees sense that their employer has not fulfilled promises it made at the time of their
recruitment or failed to accommodate needs that employees developed thereafter (Cassar
and Buttigieg, 2015; Robinson and Morrison, 2000). The experience of broken organizational
promises is deeply salient in terms of the hardship that it imposes on employees’
psychological well-being, suggesting the need for further studies that detail potentially
harmful behavioral responses by employees and tactics for reducing or mitigating these
responses (Garcia et al., 2018; Phuong, 2016; Restubog et al., 2015).
Extant scholarship cites a plethora of negative consequences of employees’beliefs that
their organization has failed to keep its promises, including enhanced emotional exhaustion
(Lapointe et al., 2013), insomnia (Garcia et al., 2018), workplace deviance (Restubog et al.,
2015) and turnover intentions (Kraak et al., 2017), as well as reduced psychological
Personnel Review
Vol. 49 No. 4, 2020
pp. 993-1014
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-11-2018-0441
Received 3 November 2018
Revised 22 May 2019
23 July 2019
Accepted 8 September 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
993
Coping and
laughing in the
face of broken
promises
well-being (Hill et al., 2016), organizational commitment (Cassar and Briner, 2011), job
satisfaction (Arain et al., 2012), trust in the employer (Tomprou et al., 2012), in-role
performance and organizational citizenship behavior (Suazo and Stone-Romero, 2011) and
career success (Restubog et al., 2011). With this study, we investigate the harmful effect of
employees’perception of broken organizational promises on their propensity to undertake
productive work behaviors in the form of creativity. Creative behaviors involve
the generation of novel ideas that can add to the organization’s well-being and
competitive advantage (De Clercq et al., 2017; Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Shalley and
Gilson, 2004; Tse and Chiu, 2014). We focus explicitly on these creative behaviors because
they tend to be disruptive and shift the functions of the organization, such that other
organizational members may express skepticism or even resist novel ideas, particularly if
the outcomes make them look bad or undermine their influence (Buchanan and Badham,
1999; Yuan and Woodman, 2010). In this sense, creative behaviors already might be
somewhat discouraged, so it is particularly important for organizational decision makers to
identify additional reasons employees might avoid productive creative activities, namely,
due to their frustration about broken organizational promises that leave them with
insufficient residual energy to undertake strenuous activities that upset the status quo
(Amabile, 1996; Coelho et al., 2011; Hobfoll and Shirom, 2000).
COR theory
In addition to being theoretically and managerially important, our focus on creative
behaviors is driven by a research gap: despite a general recognition that employees who
blame their employer for not keeping its promises tend to feel frustrated and economize their
productive work efforts (Chen et al., 2008; Rayton and Yalabik, 2014; Restubog et al., 2015;
Suazo and Stone-Romero, 2011), research that explicitly links employees’perceptions of
contract breach with a reluctance to engage in creative behavior is sparse (Agarwal and
Bhargava, 2014). Using conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989), we propose
that unfavorable organizational conditions, such as perceptions of contract breach, tend to
deplete employees’energy resource levels, leading them to seek to conserve their existing
resource bases when they decide which activities to perform, including creative behaviors
(Hobfoll, 2001; Hobfoll and Shirom, 2000). Our study does not directly measure the specific
ways such energy depletion might be manifest, but our logic is based on previous studies
that suggest various energy-draining mechanisms, resulting from broken organizational
promises, that speak to either employees’limited ability to perform productive work
activities, such as a sense of reduced job control (Shore and Tetrick, 1994) and enhanced
stress levels (Ng and Feldman, 2012), or a lack of motivation, as informed by their
self-depreciating thoughts (Restubog et al., 2008) and frustration about disrespectful
organizational treatment (Rousseau, 1995). We subsume these different mechanisms under
the general umbrella of energy resource losses, while also acknowledging that the
manifestations of such losses can be manifold. When employees blame their organization for
not keeping its promises, they may lack the stamina or energy resources to engage in
energy-consuming creative behaviors, irrespective of the specific form that their energy
depletion takes (Lapointe et al., 2013; Suazo and Stone-Romero, 2011).
Moreover, we follow the logic of COR theory to suggest that the presence of negative
behavioral responses depends on whether employees can draw from relevant personal
resources to counter resource losses due to contract breaches (Abbas et al., 2014; Hobfoll and
Shirom, 2000). Hobfoll (2002, p. 307) broadly defines the term resources as “those entities
that either are centrally valued in their own right […] or act as a means to obtain centrally
valued ends.”Of the various resources that Hobfoll (2001) lists in describing COR theory,
two notable examples are a feeling of having control over one’s life and a sense of humor.
We similarly focus on employees’emotion regulation skills and humor skills as two critical
994
PR
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