International Comparisons of Employment Contracts, Psychological Contracts, and Worker Well‐Being

Abstract

Abstract The study was designed to explore the impact of any country differences on the use of and impact of temporary employment contracts. In addition, data were collected from three broad sectors to represent different types of work. This chapter reports the effects of country and sector on the results. A first step was to agree a number of relevant dimensions on which to compare countries and a number of institutional and cultural factors were identified. However comparison across the six European countries and Israel revealed rather few differences of the sort that might be expected to have an impact on temporary employment. Despite this, there are large national differences in the use of temporary workers. The statistical analysis of our survey data reveals that the amount of variation in outcomes that can be explained by the country or sector level is small. It rarely exceeded ten per cent and was generally overwhelmed by the much greater influence of factors at the organizational and workplace levels.