POST-VIOLATION OF TACIT CONTRACTS: A MODEL PROPOSAL BASED ON THE AIR FRANCE PILOTS CASE STUDY

Abstract

The economic changes impacting today’s organizations are challenging the content of the psychological and social contracts forged with employees. Considering this context, we are looking to study the breach and the violation of tacit contracts of a profession. The research objective, which falls within the Organizational Behavior field, is to examine the temporality of breaches and violations between the different levels of tacit contracts, whose articulations have received little attention. This work considers the possibilities of contagion or protection from one contract to the other first and then the reconfiguration of violated contracts. In doing so, post-violation is discussed by linking forms of voice behavior with contracts reconfiguration. Thus, the results contribute to a better understanding of the research on the recovery from contract breach and violation, considered as being embryonic in the literature. The empirical part of this research is based on a case study in the airline industry which experienced unprecedented structural changes at the source of a new deal disrupting the content of the cockpit crew tacit contracts. The initial strike, which started in the autumn of 2014 and referred to as “historic” in the press, concerned the conflict between the Air France pilots and their management. It provides the framework of a dual (psychological and social) contracts violation as a support to the study of its consequences. The analysis is built on several documentary corpuses (press articles, trade union leaflets, information sent by the Air France management to their pilots) as well as an observation phase and 35 interviews conducted with Air France pilots and managers. Finally, the study allows to develop an integrated post-violation model embedded within the two dimensions (hedonic value and activity) necessary to redefine the social exchange theory more precisely.