
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 2, n.º 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 93-113
People and knowledge management in organizations. Challenges of the next decades
João Paulo Feijoo
102
communication, the nature and resilience of the "psychological contract", social
responsibility, and work-life balance.
f. The change in the psychological contract
In the second half of the 20
th
century, the psychological contract - that is, the beliefs,
perceptions, expectations, and reciprocal informal obligations between the worker and
the organization he/she works for - evolved towards a series of mutual guarantees with
the goal of assuring labour stability and order: in exchange for the promise of
employment security and stability, of equal treatment and social protection, workers
compromised by remaining relatively complacent, by remaining committed and faithful
to the organization, by accepting the separation between professional life and private
life, and by deferring the management of their careers to the employer.
This tacit agreement is currently subject to unbearable tensions and ceased to make
any sense to the generations that recently entered professional life.
The responsibility lies, in first place, with the organizations, whose behaviour in the last
two or three decades
5
- lay offs, downsizing, early retirement, reduction in social
protection,
6
rising insecurity....- points to a unilateral denunciation of the terms of the
agreement. It is true that many of those measures were inevitable in the framework of
an increasingly competitive global economy and may have contributed to saving many
jobs. Nevertheless, workers see them as a breach of contract without any grounds on
reprehensible behaviour on their part.
On the other hand, in the last sixty or seventy years, the relationship between the "life
expectancy" of technologies, organizations, and careers has suffered a complete
reversal. In the first part of the 20
th
century, a certain technology (for example,
transport of merchandise by sea) had a window of applicability equal or superior to the
"life expectancy" of the majority of the organizations which used it and those
organizations employed successive generations of workers whose activity changed little
over time. Nowadays, in order to survive, companies created to explore a certain
technology must continuously reconvert to other technologies that replace the original
one. Along the course of a professional life of 40 years (soon to be longer!), workers
must constantly update their skills and, even so, will witness the disappearance of the
companies they worked for or their transformation to the extent that the companies no
longer have a place for them.
All this dynamic of destruction and "Schumpeterian" reconversion, all these constant
mergers and acquisitions, instil in the worker a sense of vulnerability of the
organizations and a suspicion that, even if the organizations were so inclined, they will
not be able to fulfil their promises of employment security and stability long enough.
As discussed further along in the section on emerging values, the increase in the
participation of women signalled the end of the acceptance of the secondary role of
5
Many authors place the genesis of this process in the early eighties, with the wave of liberalization and
deregulation that started in the United States and the United Kingdom by the governments of Reagan
and Thatcher, who had been recently elected.
6
Notice, for instance, the conversion of retirement plans from "standard benefit" to "standard
contribution" which has taken effect a little bit all over in the last two or three years.