Digital Psychological Contract Model: A Conceptual Framework for Connectivity Expectations

A conceptual article proposing the Digital Psychological Contract Model (DPCM), which theorizes connectivity expectations as implicit contract terms in digitally mediated work. The model links expectations of availability to digital breach, affective violation, and erosion of organizational trust. The work was authored by Nthabeleng Innocentia Mdhluli and published under a CC-BY-4.0 license on figshare in June 2026.

Use Cases

• Developing survey scales based on the model's measurable indicator domains.
• Theorizing the distinctness of digital breach from technostress and traditional contract breach.
• Analyzing the moderating role of perceived autonomy and leadership norm-modelling on connectivity expectations.
• Investigating organizational communication culture and leadership signaling as antecedents to digital psychological contracts.

Strengths

• Provides a structured conceptual model (DPCM) with a propositional architecture.
• Explicitly differentiates digital breach from related concepts like technostress and organizational injustice.
• Published under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license for reuse.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 659.1 KB DOCX file containing a conceptual article, not a quantitative data collection.
• Row count and column-level documentation are absent, limiting suitability for direct quantitative analysis.
• The description metadata is conceptual; actual data for model testing is not provided.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Conceptual research drawing on psychological contract theory, digital communication research, boundary management research, and technostress literature.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 04:27:23.