Psychological Contract in the Context of Sport Organizations

The central tenets in psychological contract theory posit that employees create expectations about what the organization owes to them and what they owe to their organization (Robinson, 1996). As a result, the psychological contract at work is understood as an exchange relationship about the belief of implicit agreements between employees and employers (Herriot and Pemberton, 1997; Kotter, 1973; Rousseau, 1990, 1995). It is this perceptual nature of the psychological contract that makes it different from a working or legal contract (Robinson, Kraatz and Rousseau, 1994). The psychological contract is essentially subjective, personal and idiosyncratic (Turnley and Feldman, 1999a), or, as noted by Rousseau (1989: 123), “[it lies] in the eye of the beholder.”