The objective of this research was to explore the moderating impact of perceived organizational justice on the relationship between psychological contract breach and job involvement under merger and acquisition circumstances. Evidences supporting the relationship between variables from the previous literature review were proven in this research.
As the author did the two sample t-test to the two different groups of participants, it can be said that M&A strategy did do some difference to the employees. Although two sample t- test showed that there are no difference in perceived psychological contract breach and organizational justice between two groups of people, which the researcher assumed that not only the M&A enterprises but also the general company have the psychological contract breach issue. And most of the employees perceived same level of justice in their organization.
However, employees have distinctive job involvement between two groups of employees. It indicated that under the same psychological contract breach and organizational justice situation, employees who retained in the merged company formed higher job involvement.
The Result of this research showed that psychological contract breach has negative effect on job involvement, and perceived organizational justice had negative moderating effect on the relationship between psychological contract breach and job involvement. That is, perceived organizational justice weakened the relationship between psychological contract breach and job involvement.
From this research, it can be indicated that under M&A circumstances, people who survived through this process care more about the equity feelings than being violated of their
between the employer and themselves under the M&A process, and they are likely to “accept”
it. We can find out in this study that they care about whether it is fair in distributing, processing, and interaction or not. The justice in their mind can be the factor to influence their job involvement.
Hypothesis 1 predicted that psychological contract breach is negatively related to job involvement. As previous studies shown, perceived psychological contract breach and feeling of violation can cause negative job attitudes (Schmit, Amel & Ryan, 1993; Robinson, 1996).
It is also as our expectation that when individuals felt the violation between organization and themselves, the job involvement changed.
Hypotheses 2 predicted that perceived organizational justice negatively moderated the relationship between psychological contract breach and job involvement. The supported hypotheses indicated that people under the M&A circumstances tried to ignore the psychological contract breach that happened to them. The thing they care about more is whether the organization provides a relatively justice working environment, especially when distributing the sources, processing the affairs and interacting with supervisors and peers.
Significance of the Study
This research can contribute to both practical and theoretical HR field. It provided the new insight of how organizational justice impacted the psychological contract breach and see how employee reacted in their job involvement under the process of M&A. Through this study, HR practitioner may build up the concept of how to use the organizational justice and Psychological contract on the employees. What‟s more, HR practitioner who is under the process of M&A can have an overview of the circumstances. Finally, it also contributed to the theoretical research. Since few researcher link the psychological contract breach and the
is hard to approach. The study can also give an inspiration to the future research. Choosing other certain groups as the target sample can be another interesting issue. The findings may have other implications on people with different background.
Limitations
Several limitations were in this study. First, the questionnaires were answered by the respondents only the self-report may cause the common method variance (CMV) problems and the risk that the participants misrepresent themselves. By not explaining the variables in the questionnaire, adopting different point of likert scale and reverse items to prevent participants from filling the answer randomly, we can decrease the problem of CMV.
However, through the Harman‟s factor analysis, we still can find the CMV problems happened in this research which might be the reason that some model fit indexes such as χ²/df and RMSEA did not reach the standard of the requirement from Byrne (1998).
For this research, data collection is the most difficult stage. Lots of enterprises regarded mergers and acquisitions as a confidential event. We are not allowed to deliver the questionnaire to those companies. Furthermore, lots of employees who had been through mergers and acquisitions process are no longer staying in the remained company which causes more difficulties for the researcher. In the end, the researcher only adopted the data from the participants that remain in the merged companies. The researcher got most of the responses from people in financial and insurance industry in which the employees are more enthusiastic in helping the researcher to fill up the questionnaires. On the other hand, some questionnaires are delivered by the managerial level. Employees might alert about the questionnaires even if the researcher had claimed to make it anonymous. The researcher also suspected that some of the participants did not read every single question and give the best response. The researcher had already made some effort on excluding some responses that
Since the researcher was not able to approach average participants that had different kind of M&A experience, only the participant who retained in the merged companies were analyzed. The researcher excluded the participants who are the employees in the company that merged or acquired other company and those who are no longer stayed in the M&A company. The five different situations cause different state of mind which can be another issue that can be discussed in future research.
Recommendations
Recommendation for Practice
Through this study, the researcher suggested the importance of psychological contract breach and the organizational justice in the workplace. For employees, psychological contract breach can influence their job involvement. However, employees under the unstable environment tend to neglect the violation even though it is a factor that influenced individual‟s job involvement. It reflected a fact that people under M&A process might anticipate the breaches which were not easy to change. It seemed that people turned to pursue the equity in the organization rather than strive for the accomplishment of psychological contract.
Under the M&A circumstances, some promises might break and influence the employees‟ involvement to their job. However, the research recommended the employer to provide a comparatively fair working environment for the employees, which can positively affect the job involvement.
On the other hand, enterprises in Taiwan should also think about why employees feel no differences of psychological contract breach between M&A and non-M&A circumstances.
involvement, it is a sign that employees didn‟t like the feeling of betrayed by their employers.
Employees who are not working in the M&A company will have a more server reaction in their job involvement. It is awaited that entrepreneur had the corporate social responsibility and can take good care of their employees. It is acceptable that enterprises use psychological contract to attract employees but the employees will expect that employers can fulfilled the promises as possible as they can.
Recommendation for future research
For the Future research, researchers can focus on how to approach a wider sample size and more response from various. The researchers in the future can also focus on the comparison of the general employees and employees who experienced the M&A process.
Through analyzing the data collected by different participants, researchers can further examine the moderating effect of perceived organizational justice.
Since lots of people had experiences of psychological contract breach (Robinson &
Rousseau, 1994), future research can put more emphasis on finding ways to prevent the employees from reducing their job involvement and enhanced the performance of the companies.
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Appendix A: Distribution of Paper-based Questionnaire
編號 公司 發出數量 回收數量 採計數量 不採計數
量 回收率% 採用率%
銀行業
1 銀行 A 80 73 60 18 91% 75%
2 銀行 B 21 19 4 15 90% 19%
小計 101 92 64 28 91% 63%
保險業
3 保險 A 30 21 18 2 70% 60%
4 保險 B 90 75 50 27 83% 56%
5 保險 C 70 36 23 13 51% 33%
6 保險 D 55 46 27 19 84% 49%
7 保險 E 35 30 26 4 86% 74%
小計 280 208 144 65 74% 51%
科技業
8 科技 A 40 11 5 6 28% 13%
9 科技 B 35 19 17 2 54% 49%
10 科技 C 14 6 2 4 43% 14%
小計 89 36 24 12 40% 27%
其他
11 證券 A 20 11 5 6 55% 25%
12 貨運 A 15 10 6 4 67% 40%
13 媒體 A 15 3 2 1 20% 13%
14 散發 30 23 2 21 77% 7%
小計 80 47 15 33 59% 19%
Total 550 383 247 138 70% 45%
Appendix B: Two sample T- test result
層面 併購經驗 人數 平均數 標準差 T 值
JI 被併購且留任者 277 3.61 .61
2.385*
無併購經驗者 165 3.46 .72
PCB 被併購且留任者 277 3.33 1.14
無併購經驗者 165 3.32 1.14 .08
POJ 被併購且留任者 277 3.37 .73
無併購經驗者 165 3.32 .72 .74
*p<.05