An Empirical Study on the Enforced Implementation of the Policy of Conversion of Non-regular Workers to Regular Workers and its Effects on Converted Employee: From an Institutional Decoupling Perspective

In 2017, Korean government has massively drived the policy of conversion of nonregular workers to regular workers in most public institutions in Korea. In the course of this enforced implementation of the policy, there have emerged many diverse disconnects between the government espoused in its formal policy and how it actually settled down in individual organizations. With this context as an empirical setting of our research, this study has interested in finding how such institutional decoupling the adoption of formal policy from their actual implementation affects the perceptions and attitudes of the converted regular employees. For this research, we conducted a survey on employees working in Korean National Park Service(KNPS) who have acquired the status of regular worker due to the conversion policy enforced by the government. The results of analysis indicated that the perceived institutional decoupling by members of the organization was positively related to their perception of psychological contract breach and negatively related to their organizational identity. And it was also found that the perception of psychological contract breach negatively affected not only to the organizational attitudes such as organizational identity but also to job-related attitudes such as work engagement. In addition, the double mediating role of the psychological contract violation and organizational identity was observed in the relationship between the perceived institutional decoupling and work engagement. Based on the analysis results of this study, practical and policy implications, and future research directions are then discussed.