Minding the Psychological Contract: Intersection of Cognitive Research and Practice

1. Minding the Psychological Contract: Intersection of Cognitive Research and Practice Denise M. Rousseau Carnegie Mellon University MOC Welcome Academy of Management

2. Cognition 101 • Mindfulness—Directed attention is needed to modify frames, schemas, or scripts • Bounded Rationality—Can process only limited information at a time (serial processing, limited attention and computational capacity) • Fast/Frugal is Norm—Packing info into hierarchically organized concepts makes for computational ease

3. Cognition 101con’t • Thinking =>Frame* Application • *(Schema, Script) • Meaning matters (not the Stimulus)

5. Cognition 101 cont’d • Presentism: We typically have difficulty imagining a tomorrow different from today and assume that we will think, want or feel much the same as we do now. • Anticipation Machine: Most important thing a human brain does is ‘making the future’.

6. Psych Con Minding #1 • Individual can only process limited information at one time • Standard Models of Everything cannot be individually accurate • Psychological Contract must be filled in over time to be an informed guide for interpretation and action

7. Standard Model

8. Individual With Bounded Rationality

9. Psych Con Minding #2 • Requires directed mental force to create or revise • Mindfulness—Directed attention is needed to modify frames, schemas, or scripts • When people are paying attention, the employer may a) be silent, b) convey what it doesn’t intent, c) be represented by an “agent” with another point of view -- Exposure to variations creates deeper processing of meanings (more elaborate “expert” schemas)

10. Psych Con Minding #3 • Filling in is episodic: cues must capture attention. • Episodes post-hire occur in social context—network ties and informal social structure impact what is paid attention to and what interpretations are made • Pre-contract and post-contract perceptions and motives differ (greatest differences evident in first year)

11. Psych Con Minding #4 • Increasing Imagination Improves Capacity to Anticipate (helps in contracting &EBMgt) • MY FAVOR: Mind exploits ambiguity for its own gratification • MY WAY: Reciprocity favors personal preferences (competencies, habits, resources)-- cf. OCB. • EASY: When it’s easy to imagine an event, its likelihood is overestimated (availability) • INSIGHT DEPENDS ON OTHERS TO FILL PERCEPTUAL GAPS: We can anticipate future more accurately when others share their own experiences (surrogators: veterans share w/newcomers).

13. Practice • Biased toward top-down control • Cognition and organization-related processes are bottom-up as well as top-down. • Undervalues social influence as a major source of fill-ins (discrepancy resolution, learning) • Under-uses discrepancies and variety of experiences as learning opportunities (performance vs. learning goals)

14. Teaching is Practice and (Effective) Practice is Teaching • Learning occurs any time a discrepancy (error or gap in understanding) is resolved. • Fewer errors • More complete or mutual understanding • Learning is highest among those whose training involved more discrepancies • (minimal instruction or explicit incorporation of mistakes) compared with trainees who received detailed instructions and prescriptions for action (Frese) • Mindfulness promotes learning (cf. Langer) • Continuous creation of new categories • Openness to new information, • Implicit awareness of more than one perspective.

15. Mindful psychological contracting? • Can psychological contract be created mindfully? (cf. as opposed to mindless application of existing categories; Kawakami, White, Langer, 2000). • Careful attention to novel distinctions and insights (e.g., “development”, “support”, “value-added”) • Awareness of “conditional nature” of knowledge and beliefs • Expand zone of negotiation/acceptance by perspective taking, new distinctions

16. Conclusion • Taking bounded rationality seriously: • limited number of factors influence schema (e.g., psychological contract) at a given time. • accumulation of influences occurs over time via schema formation and bottom-up experiences; • exposure to varied sources and environments creates more complex (complete?) schemas, and more mindful use of them. • Variation may be more important than consistency in creating meaningful and adaptive psychological contracts and agreements (with mindful reflection)