The Impact of the Psychological Contract on the Relationship between Personal-Job Fit and Contextual Performance Focused on Differences According to the Type of Groups of Social Work Organization in South Korea

Background: Contextual performance (i.e., volunteering for additional work, helping co-workers) is not required for official performance (i.e., formal and core job responsibilities), but is an action that helps the social work organization by voluntarily exceeding the organization's role expectations. While both task performance and contextual performance in job performance are important to the success of social work organizations, this present study explicitly focuses on investigating the relationship between personal-job fit and contextual performance among social workers in Korea. This study examines the role of psychological contracts as moderators of associations between personal-job fit and contextual performance through comparison between social workers in the non-profit sector and public sector.

Methods: Data were collected from 371 social workers in the non-profit sector (e.g., community center) and public sector (e.g., Department of Human Services) in Gwangju, South Korea. The research questions are: 1) Does personal-job fit affect social workers’ contextual performance? 2) Do psychological contracts moderate the effects of personal-job fit on social workers’ contextual performance? 3) If so, does this moderating effect differ between the two groups? This study hypothesizes that the moderating effects are different between the two groups. Descriptive analyses estimated differences by gender, age, educational level, and organizational careers. T-tests indicated the significance of the overall differences in means, and Tukey’s post-hoc tests provided specific comparisons between the groups. In the main analysis, multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the effect of personal-job fit on psychological performance, considering how the main effects, moderator, and interactions were related to the contextual performance variables. The analyses were conducted using SPSS 22.

Results: Overall, personal-job fit related positively to both psychological contract and contextual performance between the two groups. There were significant relationships between personal-job fit and contextual performance (β = 0.033, p < 0.05), and between psychological contract and contextual performance (β = 0.028, p < 0.05). There was also significant interaction between psychological contract and contextual performance (β = 0.039, p < 0.05). These results indicate that psychological contract had moderating effects on the relationships between social workers’ personal-job fit and contextual performance outcome. Indeed, there were significant differences between the groups: the social workers in the non-profit sector experienced more significant effects on contextual performance.

Implication: The findings suggest that social welfare policy implications and targeted assistance for those social workers trying to secure adequate employment with better performance depends on the organization type. Also, examining the effects of differences of personal-job fit and psychological contract on contextual performance depending on organization types supports a facilitator factor for the relationship in order to improve suggestions on finding ways encourage contextual performance among social workers.