Temporal Proximity Matters: The Impact of Justice Information Timing on Psychological Contract Breach Resolution

Abstract

Although scholars and practitioners argue that organizations should provide justice information in the aftermath of a psychological contract breach (PC breach) to prevent or reduce violation feelings, it remains unclear whether that information should be provided within a few hours, days, or weeks following a PC breach. We estimated a 2-level time-lagged regression model on experience sampling data from 76 (226 observations), 70 (213 observations), and 70 (344 observations) employees with different intervals to test the durability of informational justice as a moderator on the PC breach-violation feelings relationship. We found that justice information should be provided in close temporal proximity (i.e., within the same day; Study 1) of PC breach to reduce violation feelings. In contrast, neither justice information provided the day (Study 2) or week (Study 3) after a PC breach successfully moderated the PC breach-violation feelings relationship. The current paper underscores the importance of being informationally just in close temporal proximity to a PC breach in line with resolution velocity as an indicator of the effectiveness of the recovery process. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.