The Effect of Psychological Contract Perceptions of University Administrative Personnel on their Job Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Public Service Motivation

Public institutions are the organizations that feel the pressure of producing high quality public service with scarce resources. Work life in public organizations is under the influences of the dynamics shaping organizational relationships and widely-accepted values and ideologies regarding public service. It is argued that psychological contract portrays dynamics regarding organizational relationships while public service motivation depicts values and ideologies regarding public service. A prediction design was used to examine the relationship of psychological contract perceptions of university administrative personnel to their job satisfaction and the mediating role of public service motivation in this relationship. A psychological contract scale, a public service motivation scale and a job satisfaction scale were administered to collect data. Consequently, it was found that relational contract orientation had a positive effect on job satisfaction; yet public service motivation was not a significant mediator in this relationship. Based on these results, increasing the quality of employee-organization relationship to enable the protection of public service standards and to cover basic elements of the relational contract and using human resources procedures allowing individual-focused applications instead of general level ones that ignore individual differences was recommended.