Abstract
Leadership and psychological contracts have gained popularity in research these past decades, with a constant increase in leadership theories. Many leadership styles have been extensively researched in organizational psychology, but many important aspects of leadership have remained unexplored. Psychological contracts have become an important description of the underlying expectations that exist between an employee and a leader. An outcome of these expectations being breached by leaders may lead to many negative outcomes. Although an increasing number of individual studies investigated leadership and psychological contracts together, no meta-analysis has to date synthesized these findings. This study aims to quantitatively compile and retrieve findings on the relationship between leadership and psychological contract research using meta-analytic methods to better understand their association. Furthermore, this paper also serves as an overview of both specific leadership styles and psychological contract measures individually, which may prove beneficial for future researchers. Support was found for all hypotheses regarding the relationship of leadership and psychological contracts. Furthermore, all positive leadership styles were negatively related to psychological contract breach (social exchange-based leadership, neo-charismatic leadership, and ethical leadership), while negative leadership styles within the destructive/abusive leadership category were positively related to psychological contract breach. Additionally, neo-charismatic and transactional leadership were positively related to transactional psychological contracts (TPC; transactional leadership more so than other neo-charismatic styles) and relational psychological contracts (RPC). Social exchange-based leadership was negatively related to transactional psychological contracts, but there were too few studies to infer a link to relational psychological contracts. Apparently, leader-member exchange theory is currently overemphasized in psychological contract research, providing 50% of the entire data. There was a lack of studies on neo-charismatic leadership styles in relation to psychological contract breach, and conversely articles on ethical/moral leadership in relation to psychological contract contents were also particularly lacking. Understanding how leaders’ behavior affect the psychological contracts of employees appears to be beneficial and could prevent negative work outcomes through reducing perceived contract breach. Future studies should focus on the research of non-LMX styles and psychological contracts.