Psychological Contracts
The psychological contract is the unwritten deal between employer and employee - what each believes they owe the other - and naming it surfaces expectations that were never actually agreed.
Move through four boxes in order, each one closing a little more of the gap between what was assumed and what was actually said.
Reach for this when…
- Someone hands in their notice and says it just wasn't what I signed up for.
- A team feels betrayed by a change nobody thinks was a big deal.
- You promoted someone and the relationship soured for reasons neither side can name.
How to run it
- Introduce the idea: an unwritten exchange of what each side believes they owe the other.
- Ask each person to map their own contract: what they give, what they expect back.
- Find where the contract has already been broken, or is close to it.
- Talk through what a fair renegotiation looks like.
A worked example
Situation. Salim Al Mansoori ran a 40-person BPO support desk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and could not work out why his best senior agents kept leaving within a year of promotion.
Applied. In exit conversations he used the psychological contract mapping exercise and found every leaver believed a promotion carried an unspoken deal - more autonomy - that management had never actually agreed to.
Result. He wrote the informal deal down as a real one: new team leads got defined decision rights from day one. The next cohort of promotions held.
The catch
The contract is invisible until it is broken, so most people can only describe it in hindsight - which makes the exercise better at diagnosis than prevention. It also assumes both sides are honest about what they actually expect, which managers in particular often are not.
If you can only describe your side of the contract after someone has already resigned, you found it too late.
Origin: Denise Rousseau