Exploring the psychological contract of black British clerical workers in UK local authorities

Abstract

This paper investigates the nature of the psychological contract (PC) of black Brit-ish workers in UK local authorities. Psychological contract describes an individual employee‘s perception concerning the terms and conditions of an exchange agreement between the employer and the employee (Conway and Briner, 2005). The primary focus of this research is on the individual employee‘s perspectives and not the organization‘s. The research is based on the experiences of the black British clerical workers, who have been deployed at various departments across ten UK local authorities. This research employed a qualitative method adopted from Creswell (2003). Thirty-eight interviews were conducted in ten different UK local authorities and the data was transcribed and analysed in a manner informed by the Glaser and Strauss (1990) concept of grounded theory approach. The result of this research concludes that the black British clerical workers have endorsed five distinct reasons why they joined local authorities. In addition, this research concludes that the black British clerical workers‘ response to the psycho-logical contract violations were influenced and constrained by four main societal factors, these including: (1) outside support (2) economic conditions (3) black ex-tended family and (4) educational qualification. Overall, the findings of this re-search support the notion that the black British clerical worker‘s psychological contract is uniquely different from other staff members‘, for which there has been no study done in the UK, until now.