Therese Egeland Sverdrup

“Cut Me Some Slack” The Psychological Contracts as a Foundation for Understanding Team Charters

This article examines the functioning of team charters in teamwork. We argue that the psychological contract literature serves as a theoretical foundation for understanding team charters. We examine what types of psychological contracts are established and developed during interactions between team members and whether these psychological contracts are related to team functioning. Through in-depth interviews and objective performance measures, we find some distinct patterns of psychological contracts that can be related to team functioning. Our results indicate that teams may benefit from early and explicit discussions about standards for work effort and work quality, and about the importance of being tolerant with each other. More particularly, we find that teams that are able to “cut each other some slack,” that is, the ability to live with short-term imbalances in give-and-take relationships, are more functional teams.

Multiple foci of commitment in a professional service firm: balancing complex employment relations

Employees of professional service firms (PSFs) have attachments to multiple groups, which may be either compatible or conflicting: their employer, their clients and their profession. We analyse the antecedents of commitment to these three foci based on a survey of 510 employees in a large PSF in Norway. The main findings are as follows: (1) low quality of internal work relations is negatively associated with employer commitment and draws employees towards external foci of commitment – the clients and the profession; (2) role conflict is associated with stronger commitment to the client organisation and the profession; and (3) autonomy and transferability of skills are associated with stronger commitment to the profession, but does not undermine commitment to the employer. The article contributes to our understanding of the conditions under which employees identify with external groups and when commitment to the employer may be compromised. The findings have implications for how managers can help to increase the commitment of employees involved in complex employment relations.

Restoring trust in the context of strategic change

The strategic change literature underscores the risk of loss of trust during change but does not address how trust can be restored once compromised. We conduct an inductive longitudinal study of an organization undergoing post-merger integration and examine how management worked to restore employee trust after a conflictual change process. We introduce the psychological contract perspective, which emphasizes relational explanations for loss of trust. We show that repairing trust can be conceptualized as a renegotiation of the psychological contract and develop a three-stage model of trust repair. In contrast to extant models of trust restoration, which emphasize diagnosis, explanation, penance, and reform, our model attends to relational dynamics that may emerge in the context of organizational change, with heightened uncertainty and ambiguity, and highlights the importance of restoring balance and renegotiating the contractual basis of the relationship.

Expecting the unexpected: Using team charters to handle disruptions and facilitate team performance.

Teams are increasingly relied on to manage and adapt to a changing world. Previous studies have found adaptive teams to be less susceptible to disruptive events. In this study, we test whether or not the development of a team charter 2 weeks prior to a given task increases a team’s ability to adapt to disruptions and overall performance. We find that teams that develop team charters are better able to handle disruptive events, which in turn increases their performance.