PUBLIC DUTY AND PERCEIVED PROMISES: HOW PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACTS AFFECT CIVIL SERVICE OUTPUT

This study examined relationship between job performance of civil servants and psychological contracts in the states of the South East geo-political zone. The participants comprised 3062 (males: 1098 and Females: 1964) drawn using purposeful random sampling technique from the population of civil servants in the states of the South-East geo-political zone of Nigeria. Three instruments were used for data collection, they include; Psychological Contract Scale which is an 18- item questionnaire, Psychological Contract Inventory (PCI), which is a 14 – item questionnaire and Performance Evaluation Report which is a 12- item questionnaire. Cross-sectional survey design was adopted while multiple regression analysis was applied as statistical tests. The results indicated that jointly, psychological contracts (transactional, relational breach and/fulfillment) jointly predicted civil servants’ poor job performance of R2 = .008, F(3,3058) = 8.64, p=.001 and independently as well. The result, also, showed that psychological contract breach prevailed over psychological contract fulfillment among civil servants in relation to their job performance (M = 35.90; SD = 12.45) and that psychological contract breach significantly and negatively correlated with job performance of civil servants (r = -.04, p <.01). It was concluded that that civil servants in South-East geo-political zone are having transactional psychological contract and not relational, in the same vein, they reported having breaches in their psychological contracts which affected their performances poorly