Career Promises Without a Promisor: A Psychological Contract Perspective on Organizational Career Development Systems

ABSTRACT Organizations increasingly treat career development as central to employee retention and engagement, yet employees' lived experiences of these systems remain underexplored, particularly outside Western settings. This qualitative case study examines how employees perceive their organization's career development system within a large multinational hospitality and tourism company operating in Saudi Arabia. Two complementary sources are analyzed thematically: 123 firsthand employee comments drawn from an internal electronic system and 29 semi‐structured interviews with full‐time employees. Five themes emerged: career path ambiguity and invisibility (82%), structural barriers to advancement (68%), inadequate supervisor engagement (73%), differential treatment across employee categories (61%), and employee agency in career navigation (54%). Interpreted through Psychological Contract Theory, these findings support three theoretical extensions rather than a contextual application of the theory. First, career development contracts are structurally mediated: promissory content is distributed across human resource architecture, supervisory discretion, and formal policy, leaving employees unable to localize a promisor and rendering the reneging–incongruence distinction indeterminate from the employee standpoint. Second, breach is accretive rather than episodic, inferred cumulatively from informational opacity rather than triggered by an identifiable withholding event, thereby delaying recognition, attenuating momentary violation, and substituting chronic erosion of trust. Third, employee agency functions as compensatory absorption of unmet obligation, conserving the relationship outwardly while hollowing its content, such that behavioral quiescence cannot be read as contract fulfillment. The study specifies boundary conditions under which the dyadic, episodic, and reactive assumptions of Psychological Contract Theory require revision. It identifies contract legibility as a distinct target for human resource development practice in rapidly expanding, nationalizing labor markets.