ABSTRACT
Jeremy was spitting venom. Tears of fury streamed down his face. ‘How could they do this to me after all I have given them,’ he shouted, ‘I gave them the best 10 years of my life. I was in the office every morning at 7.30 a.m., never left once before 7.30 in the evening, lost the best years of my children’s lives . . . and now they do this to me.’ Jeremy had been made redundant from his Managing Director job with a large bank and I was his counsellor. ‘Clearly, they were a poor employer,’ I said, ‘they didn’t treat you well, didn’t pay well, they didn’t give you a deserved redundancy package.’ ‘Not at all, they were terrific employers.’ ‘Why are you so angry, then?’ I probed. We worked with the anger and Jeremy came to realise, slowly, that his negative feelings were not about a company that broke its contracts or treated employees poorly. I still remember Jeremy’s words: ‘I will never get into that kind of a relationship with an organisation again.’ Jeremy had discovered the power of the psychological contract. He had felt angry and betrayed, not because the company had broken its contract with him or treated him badly, but because he had worked out a psychological contract with them (albeit they knew nothing about it) – that if he worked dedicatedly and conscientiously the Bank would never make him redundant.
