Tangled beneath decorum: Psychological contracts between master’s students and advisors in Chinese academia

While prevailing academic discourse portrays the relationship between graduate students and advisors as a harmonious collaboration, this study reveals the “entanglement beneath decorum.” Drawing on psychological contract theory, it investigates how Chinese master’s students understand and rationalize supervisory relationships amidst distinctive cultural scripts and institutional logics. This interpretive qualitative study is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with eight master’s students, analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal that their psychological contracts diverge from the rights-claiming model more common in Western contexts, manifesting instead as an obligation-internalizing model. This model spans three interrelated dimensions: (1) Dependency, whereby students construct identity through emotional belonging, resource reliance, and loyalty obligations; (2) Instrumentality, whereby students seek to realize their value through academic contribution, adapt it through non-entitlement mindsets, and constrain it through utility-based discipline; and (3) Vulnerability, whereby students employ help-seeking discourse, animal metaphors, and hedging expressions to mark and negotiate their subordinate position within hierarchical relations. Arguably, the psychological contract functions as a key cognitive-discursive mechanism through which asymmetrical relationships are stabilized and rendered intelligible. By applying psychological contract theory to non-Western higher education, this research offers novel insights for understanding and improving advisor-student relationships in high power-distance cultures.