How employees negotiate : job autonomy and negotiation self-efficacy related to integrative negotiation and negotiation results in employment relationships

To assess whether satisfaction with psychological contract breach does more depend on good negotiation skills or on a well-designed job, we first investigated the effect of negotiation self-efficacy and task autonomy on integrative negotiation with survey data from employees of a telecom company. We developed a measuring instrument for negotiation self-efficacy. Subsequently, we examined the relationship between integrative negotiation with psychological contract breach. Employees negotiate more integratively when they have higher negotiation self-efficacy, compared to employees with more task autonomy. But integratively negotiating employees do not experience the absence of psychological contract breach. However, more negotiation selfefficacy and task autonomy correlates with less psychological contract breach. The fact that both negotiation self-efficacy and task autonomy cohere with this indicator of employment relationship satisfaction has the practical implication that ‘good’ employment relationships can probably be reached through either enhancing personal negotiation skills or improving the design of jobs. We recommend interdisciplinary research into the employment relationship that integrates variables and concepts from sociology and management science with psychology