How psychological contracts motivate employer-brand patronage

Research on employees’ purchase of their employer’s product is scarce. In this paper, we investigate how psychological contracts will impact employees’ purchase motivations of their employer brand. Two studies examining real and imagined purchase behaviors show that employees with relational type of psychological contracts are more likely to purchase their employer brand than are employees with transactional type of psychological contracts. This is because the former type of psychological contracts will encourage both intrinsic and extrinsic motives to support the employer brand.