The impact of psychological contract under- and over-fulfillment on client citizenship behaviors in Enterprise systems projects: From the client’s perspective

Highlights

• Polynomial modeling and response surface analysis are applied to examine the effect of psychological contract obligation and fulfillment.

• Both psychological contract under-fulfillment and over-fulfillment decrease client citizenship behaviors in enterprise systems projects.

• Client citizenship behavior is higher when expected obligations match delivered fulfillments at a higher level.

Abstract

This study focuses on examining client citizenship behaviors (CCBs) from a psychological contract perspective in enterprise systems (ES) vendor–client relationships. Using polynomial modeling to capture the discrepancy between expected obligations and delivered fulfillments, this stud unpacks psychological contract and investigates the impacts of psychological contract under-fulfillment, fulfillment, and over-fulfillment on CCBs. The results show that both under-fulfillment and over-fulfillment of psychological contract are negatively related to CCBs. CCBs are shown to be higher when expected obligation and delivered fulfillment are both high than when both are low. The theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

Introduction

Client participation has been regarded as a critical factor to the success of enterprise systems (ES) project [1,2]. Although many ES vendors have succeeded in promoting their clients to participate in ES projects through contractual regulations [3,4], it is still challenging for ES vendors to encourage their clients to exhibit a series of client citizenship behaviors (CCBs) which are voluntary and not explicitly detailed in formal contracts [5]. CCBs, including providing ES usage feedbacks, recommending ES to partners, and helping partners with ES implementation, are critical for ES vendors to achieve competitive advantage [6]. Specifically, feedbacks from clients are helpful in finetuning software modules to better integrate multiple business processes [7]. Clients’ recommendations assist ES vendors in promoting their products because opinions from a neutral party are more convincing [8]. Helping behaviors are more effective in transferring domain knowledge and achieving ES project success [9]. Conceivably, it is imperative for ES vendors to understand how to increase the willingness of their clients to conduct CCBs in achieving the success of ES projects.

As contended by literature, citizenship behavior is discretionary and voluntary in nature, which is free from being explicitly regulated [10]. Instead of formal written contract, psychological contract, which contains a set of unwritten beliefs and expectations concerning reciprocal obligations [11], is widely considered as an effective enabler of citizenship behaviors [[12], [13], [14]]. In the context of ES project, the vendor–client relationship is a social exchange relationship where both parties pursue mutual benefits with the principle of reciprocity [15]. The social exchange between an ES vendor and its client creates a set of norms—beliefs and perceptions of obligations—that establish a psychological contract of client [16,17]. From the clients’ perspective, clients tend to behave based on their own implicit beliefs rather than explicit complex contractual rules that are impractical to execute [18,19]. Once the psychological contracts get fulfilled, these beliefs can intrinsically motivate CCBs based on the norm of reciprocity in social exchange relationships [20,21]. However, the role of psychological contracts in influencing CCBs in ES projects has rarely been mentioned. Therefore, this study attempts to scrutinize the influencing mechanisms of psychological contract fulfillment status on CCBs in ES projects.

Extant literature has widely explored the influence of breach or violation of psychological contract on citizenship behaviors (e.g., [12,13,22]). While findings of these studies have indeed extended our understandings of the role of psychological contract in citizenship behaviors, they still share some limitations. First, there is a paucity of research concentrating on inter-organizational contexts to empirically examine citizenship behaviors from the psychological contract perspective, given that previous research mainly focused on intra-organizational contexts (e.g. [12,14,23,24],). Yet, the literature indicates that, in a buyer–supplier relationship, the buyer maintains a set of expectations toward the supplier’s obligations, which introduces a distinct psychological element into the contractual relations [11,25,26]. This exchange of obligation supports the existence of a psychological contract between these two parties. In an ES project, the exchange between an ES vendor and its client involves implied obligation of reciprocity for mutual benefits [11], which thereby establishes a psychological contract between them. Given this, it is appropriate and necessary to apply psychological contract as a lens to investigate the cognitive and psychological aspects of managing CCBs in ES vendor–client relationships [11,25].

Second, although many studies have explored the effect of the under-fulfillment of psychological contract (e.g., [16,[27], [28], [29]]), few studies have investigated its over-fulfillment [29]. In an ES project, over-fulfilling obligations may come at a huge cost to ES vendors due to complex ES implementation processes. Meanwhile, maintaining cooperative relationships in ES projects involves more resources and energy, for example, building buffers into contracts to accommodate scope changes and investing time in building good relationships [19]. Furthermore, over-fulfillment may lead to clients’ perception of violation because they suspect ES vendors going beyond the boundary such as deliberately accessing business intelligence [30,31]. Specifically, when ES vendors develop an overly close bond with staff from client firms to foster knowledge sharing, it may induce clients’ concern of misappropriating their intellectual assets held by staff. Thus, comparing with under-fulfillment of psychological contract, its over-fulfillment deserves equal attention regarding its influence in ES projects.

Third, scholars normally operationalize breach and fulfillment of psychological contract by reflecting the extent to which a firm has kept its promises (e.g., [32]), omitting the joint effects of the components that comprise breach and fulfillment (i.e., expected obligations and delivered fulfillments) on citizenship behaviors [33]. In ES projects, both expected obligations and delivered fulfillments are critical factors that influence clients’ behaviors. As ES implementation is a knowledge-intensive project that requires ES vendors’ sustained support, clients believe ES vendors are obligated to perform certain behaviors to ensure the success of ES projects. These expected obligations involve a clear understanding of ES vendors’ roles and responsibilities that clients are likely to react to. The final delivered fulfillments joint with expected obligations ultimately determine the behaviors that clients respond with. Hence, it is necessary to take an expanded view of psychological contract by considering the distinction between obligations and associated fulfillments [33].

Addressing these research gaps is practically meaningful and theoretically important. Practically, although legal contracts exist between ES vendors and clients, written obligations cannot cover all concerns from clients and must be supplemented by unwritten promises [18]. Because ES implementation implies an unwritten set of expectations from clients, psychological contracts ubiquitously exist in ES vendor–client relationships. However, CCBs are free from explicit contractual regulations but can be intrinsically motivated by fulfillment of psychological contracts. Therefore, it is important for ES vendors to pay attention to the influence of psychological contracts on CCBs in achieving ES project success. Theoretically, the social exchange nature of ES vendor–client relationship implicitly establishes psychological contracts between ES vendors and clients [34,35]. While IT outsourcing research has drawn on social exchange theory (SET) [34,35], little accounts for the breach and/or fulfillment of psychological contracts that occur within social exchanges impacting ES vendor–client collaboration. By considering the distinction between expected obligations and delivered fulfillments, a psychological contract provides a more nuanced theoretical perspective to shed light on the theoretical mechanisms that how ES vendors’ fulfillment of expected obligations influences CCBs in the ES implementation context. This research contributes by employing SET to investigate CCBs in ES vendor–client relationships using a psychological contract perspective.

Based on the clients’ perspective, this study aims to examine how CCBs are influenced by ES vendors’ fulfillment of their clients’ psychological contracts. Specifically, we considered a full range of potential situations of under-fulfillment (i.e., client perceived fulfillments fall short of expected obligations), fulfillment (i.e., client perceived fulfillments match expected obligations), and over-fulfillment (i.e., client perceived fulfillments exceed expected obligations) of psychological contract. Furthermore, we compared the performance of CCBs under perfect fulfillment between situations in which delivered fulfillments and expected obligations are both low and both are high. By capturing the discrepancy between expected obligations and delivered fulfillments, this study enhances the understanding of CCBs in ES projects by considering the full range of psychological contract fulfillment situations (e.g., under-fulfillment, fulfillment, and over-fulfillment) and using polynomial modeling to examine the curvilinear relationships between psychological contract fulfillment situations and CCBs. Our research results suggest that both psychological contract under-fulfillment and over-fulfillment are negatively associated with CCBs. We further observe that, in the fulfillment situation, CCBs will be higher when fulfillments and obligations match at a high level as opposed to when they match at a low level.