Public Duty And Perceived Promises: How Psychological Contracts Affect Civil Service Output
Amaka Ngozi Ezeokoli
Department of Social Sciences, School of General Studies, Federal Polytechnic Oko, Anambra State, Nigeria
Abstract
This study examined relationship between job performance of civil servants and psychological contracts in the states of the South East geo-political zone. The participants comprised 3062 (males: 1098 and Females: 1964) drawn using purposeful random sampling technique from the population of civil servants in the states of the South-East geo-political zone of Nigeria. Three instruments were used for data collection, they include; Psychological Contract Scale which is an 18- item questionnaire, Psychological Contract Inventory (PCI), which is a 14 – item questionnaire and Performance Evaluation Report which is a 12- item questionnaire. Cross-sectional survey design was adopted while multiple regression analysis was applied as statistical tests. The results indicated that jointly, psychological contracts (transactional, relational breach and/fulfillment) jointly predicted civil servants’ poor job performance of R2 = .008, F(3,3058) = 8.64, p=.001 and independently as well. The result, also, showed that psychological contract breach prevailed over psychological contract fulfillment among civil servants in relation to their job performance (M = 35.90; SD = 12.45) and that psychological contract breach significantly and negatively correlated with job performance of civil servants (r = -.04, p <.01). It was concluded that that civil servants in South-East geo-political zone are having transactional psychological contract and not relational, in the same vein, they reported having breaches in their psychological contracts which affected their performances poorly.