The compounding effects of accumulated perceived employer exploitation when tough business decisions must be made

We examine how a single exploitative employer decision event, conceptualized as a shock, interacts with employees' accumulated perceived employer exploitation to amplify feelings of violation and influence adverse employee reactions. This interaction effect, and its boundary conditions, constitutes the primary theoretical contribution of the study. Drawing primarily on social exchange theory and informed by psychological contract theory, and the unfolding model of turnover as complementary explanatory lenses, we test this model across two experiments and find that feelings of violation resulting from an exploitative employer decision are stronger if the event occurred in the context of a more exploitative employment relationship. The mediating effects of feelings of violation on the relationship between accumulated perceived employer exploitation and an exploitative employer decision, and the employee reactions of turnover intentions and loyal boosterism are novel. Together, these results contribute to advancing research and theory on employer exploitation, psychological contracts, social exchange theory, and the unfolding model of turnover by establishing boundary conditions for the relationship among an affective event, exploitative employment relationship perceptions, and employee reactions. These results advance employer exploitation research by establishing that accumulated exploitative relationship history moderates the intensity of employee reactions to discrete shock events, a distinction prior research has not empirically tested.