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Untangling Employee Loyalty: A Psychological Contract Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

David W. Hart  and
Jeffery A. Thompson
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Abstract:

Although business ethicists have theorized frequently about the virtues and vices of employee loyalty, the concept of loyalty remains loosely defined. In this article, we argue that viewing loyalty as a cognitive phenomenon—an attitude that resides in the mind of the individual—helps to clarify definitional inconsistencies, provides a finer-grained analysis of the concept, and sheds additional light on the ethical implications of loyalty in organizations. Specifically, we adopt the psychological contract perspective to analyze loyalty's cognitive dimensions, and treat loyalty as an individual-level construction of perceived reciprocal obligations. Based upon this perspective, we present a three-tiered framework of loyalty that provides a psychologically informed definition of the concept, specifies the variety of obligation types that loyalty can imply, and anticipates the potential for asymmetrical loyalty configurations between employers and employees. We use the framework to articulate moral issues associated with both symmetrical and asymmetrical loyalty configurations and discuss the implications of the framework for theory and practice.

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Articles
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Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 297 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Business Ethics Quarterly 2007

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