Impact, Interrupted: How and When Thwarted Prosocial Impact Undermines Employee Performance and Retention

To attract and motivate employees, many organizations convey a compelling mission and design jobs with the apparent opportunity to make a prosocial difference. Yet, this opportunity may not always be fully realized despite the best efforts of employees. In our research, we examine experiences of “thwarted prosocial impact”—the belief that the organization is limiting the prosocial impact one could have through their work. Drawing from psychological contract theory and the relational job design literature, we suggest that thwarted prosocial impact undermines the performance and retention of individual employees because it leads employees to perceive that their ideological contract with the organization is not being sufficiently fulfilled. Further, we theorize that these deleterious effects are particularly strong for those with high levels of contact with beneficiaries in their jobs. We test these ideas in a large sample of fully employed alumni from a public university. Results indicate that thwarted prosocial impact predicts low levels of ideological contract fulfillment, particularly for those in high-beneficiary-contact jobs. These effects were associated with lower coworker-rated boosterism behavior and greater self-rated counterproductive behavior directed at the organization. Through serial mechanisms of ideological fulfillment and counterproductive work behavior, thwarted impact significantly predicted voluntary turnover one year later.