Personality and balanced psychological contracts: The mediating roles of epistemic curiosity and rule-following behavior

摘要

This study extends prior research on the relationships between personality constructs and types of psychological contracts by exploring how the Big Five traits predict balanced psychological contracts. Further, we determine whether epistemic curiosity and rule-following behavior are key mediators of the proposed relationships. We tested our proposed hypotheses using three-wave time-lagged data from 469 respondents. The results indicated that openness to experience was positively associated and both conscientiousness and neuroticism were negatively associated with balanced contracts. Extraversion and agreeableness were not associated with balanced contracts. We also established the mediating role of epistemic curiosity in the relationships between personality traits and balanced contracts, but there was no support for the mediating role of rule-following behavior in the present study. These findings have important implications for managers and organizations in terms of selecting the right person for a job (person-job fit) and ensuring employee retention (person-organization fit), hence having a bottom-line effect on firm performance. Future research directions are also discussed.