Nexus Between Work Disruption, Work Life Conflict and Psychological Contract Breach: Applying Conversation of Resources Theory

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to find out if the perverse inter-relationship between Work Disruption, Work-Life Conflict and Psychological Contract Breach can be redeemed through organizational support. Conservation of Resources Theory suggests this nexus as work disruption, job related anxiety and work-life conflict of employees are types of resource loss leading to negative outcome of psychological contract breach. However, COR theory also predicts that resources can be conserved so we have included perceived organization support in our model as a moderator. Target population for the study are public sector employees in Pakistan and sample is of administrative staff in public hospitals of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Using an instrument with scales previously validated in literature we conducted a survey of 270 employees. We applied SEM using SMART- PLS to test our hypothesis as well as reliability and validity of the instrument in our target population. Our findings reveal that the public sector employees who receive organizational support do not suffer from PCB. We also found that JRA and WD lead to Work-life conflict. However, we did not find mediation or moderation effects to be significant. This means that the mechanism for reducing PCB in our population is straight forward and there is no significant effect, either direct or indirect, of WLC on PCB. WLC happens simply due to JRA and WD in this population. Recommendations to Pakistani public sector mangers and future research directions are given based on these findings.