Dynamic psychological contract lab

Welcome to the website of the Dynamic psychological contract lab, which is part of the Work and Organizational Psychology research unit (click here for the WOPs website) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Our lab focuses on studying dynamic processes at the workplace, with a specific emphasis on understanding how psychological contracts are formed, negotiated, changed, and abandoned over time. These psychological contracts are essential to understand employees’ behaviors, as they capture an employee’s subjective beliefs regarding mutual obligations between the employee and an employer. Fulfilment and breach of these obligations form powerful determinants of employees’ behaviors in the workplace.

If you wish to know more about our research, some recent key publications are:

• Solinger, O.N., Joireman, J., Vantilborgh, T., & Bailliet, D.P. (2021). Change in unit-level job attitudes following strategic interventions: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Early View. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2523
• Achnak, S., Schippers, A., & Vantilborgh, T. (2021). To deny, to justify, or to apologize: Do social accounts influence stress levels in the aftermath of psychological contract breach? BMC Psychology, 9(1), 1-18.
• Yang, Y., Griep, Y., & Vantilborgh, T. (2020). Exploring temporal changes in obligated and delivered inducements: a dynamic systems perspective. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 29(2), 183-199.
• Vantilborgh, T., Hofmans, J., & Judge, T.A. (2018). The time has come to study dynamics at work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(9), 1045-1049.
• Vantilborgh, T. (2019). Emerging, crystalizing, and changing psychological contracts over time: Introducing the iPC-network model. In G. Cooper & Y. Griep, Handbook of research on the psychological contract at work. London: Palgrave.