Employment Contracts and Well-being Among European Workers

Temporary employment contracts are now commonplace in business. However the move towards such employment structures has a significant, and hitherto little understood impact on 'the psychological contract' between employee and organizations. This book is amongst the first to tackle this problem. With detailed research findings from seven countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and (for a non-European perspective) Israel, it presents an integrated model of the effects of temporary work. The model incorporates key recent trends, including the expansion of non-permanent employment as a persistent form of employment flexibility, the increasing importance of the psychological contract, and the diversity of the European labour market as a result of state legislation. By presenting the results of an overview of the research literature on this contemporary labour market trend this book is of real value to researchers, practitioners and policy makers.'...theoretically sophisticated, empirically based and well-coordinated...a major advance in our knowledge of the psychological consequences of temporary employment...required reading for anyone seeking to understand how changes in employment relations and psychological contracts have affected well-being in industrial societies.' Professor Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA