Dimensions of the Psychological Contract:A Study of Employee Expectations in an IT organization

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study and identifies areas of employee expectations within the broad framework of Psychological Contract in the IT sector. It is a case study in a small scale IT organisation. The scope of the study was restricted to understand expectations only and did not extend to assessing satisfaction levels. The study was conducted in two phases - (i) Exploration to identify the areas of expectations, and (ii) Validation through collection and analysis of data. Based on a survey tool specifically developed for this purpose, data was collected from 78 employees. Factor analysis was conducted to identify and confirm certain factors in employee expectations. All the areas clustered into nine factors accounting for 68% of the cumulative variance. Based on the criterion of qualitative content fit as observed from literature as well as the organisational context, the individual items were categorised into the four factors of employee expectations. Among these, learning expectations are found to be strongest, followed by project expectations, the next being mentoring and leading expectations and the last work environment expectations.