- Title
- Employment status and the psychological contract: Hong Kong academics
- Creator
- Lo, Si Ming, Victoria
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)
- Description
- In response to growing competition and financial pressures, universities increasingly rely on contingently employed academics to mitigate changes in global student markets and reduce labour costs. Growing reliance on contingently employed academics is no longer contained to Western universities as it becomes more common in Asian regions. The trend brings with it risks to equity, quality and institutional reputation. Despite considerable literature on the problems for and around casual or adjunct academics in Western nations, there is little attention, neither in the West nor the East, to how these academics view their employment relationship in comparison to tenured and contract academics. Insights into the Psychological Contract of academics in different forms of employment will help address managerial challenges associated with the changing composition of the academic workforce. In the context of higher education institutions in Hong Kong, the study aims to explore the differential impacts of employment status on academics’ perceived exchange relationships with their employing institutions. Specifically, the study investigates and compares the Psychological Contract among academics employed in tenured (permanent), casual (sessional) and contract (fixed-term of longer duration) positions. Additionally, contract volition and contract renewal expectation are examined for their influence on the relationship between employment status and the Psychological Contract. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire from 169 business school academics from across the 17 degree-awarding institutions in Hong Kong. The study identifies a unique PC for each employment category: high levels of socioemotional, Relational-orientation among tenured academics; largely economic, Transactional orientation among casual academics; and low levels of both Relational and Transactional obligations among contract academics. This finding implies PC is a more layered construct rather than simply a continuum extending from Transactional to Relational. An additional Ideological dimension was added to the traditional Relational-Transactional PC typology with the finding that all academics, regardless of employment status, held high levels in the Ideological dimension. This result suggests that profession is a distinct construct outside of the employment relationship but affecting it in various ways. Although neither contract volition nor contract renewal expectation moderated the relationship between PC and employment status, contract, rather than casual academics, were most concerned with their contracts and their renewal. This unexpected result relates to the atypical respondent profile for casual academics compared to Western studies. Casual academics in Hong Kong are older, predominantly male, more settled with lengthy periods working for the same institutions, and mostly industry practitioners. On the other hand, contract academics more closely resemble Western casual academics because of their relative youth and insecurity suggesting the influence of national economies and higher education systems on employment relationships. At an institutional level, the research highlights the need for a greater consciousness of the influences of employment status on the management of academics. The differences in Hong Kong and Western academic profiles bring into question the preconception of involuntary, precarious casuals and calls for reflection regarding the policies and business models in the higher education in Hong Kong.
- Subject
- psychological contract; employment status; Hong Kong academics; contract volition; contract renewal expectation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1403702
- Identifier
- uon:35207
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Si Ming, Victoria Lo
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 371 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |