WeAreHuman@Work | #043 | The Promise and the Delivery - Thirty years of evidence on what a broken deal costs, and why your retention figures are the last place it shows up

Every EVP is a promise. Somewhere in your careers page is a sentence about growth, or flexibility, or a culture where people are heard, and someone joined on the strength of it. The psychological contract literature has spent thirty years measuring what those promises cost when they are not kept — and the answer is not the one on your retention dashboard.

I should declare an interest. My doctorate was on exactly this: what happens between a person and an employer when the unwritten deal holds, and when it breaks. So I read the breach literature the way you would read a survey of your own street. I know which houses are on it.

The employer's defence is a good one. Most breaches are not lies. Budgets move, a manager who made a promise leaves, a reorganisation reaches a desk it was never meant to reach. Nobody decided to break the deal. They simply did not know it existed in the form the employee held it.

Grant that. It is the whole point.

So let me put my position before the evidence: most organisations break the deal not by malice but by ignorance — they cannot name what they promised, so they cannot tell when they have stopped delivering it — and the bill for that ignorance is the most consistent finding in the field.

La Rochefoucauld had the mechanism in 1665. The EVP is written according to hopes. The experience is delivered according to fears. The gap between them has a name, a frequency, and now, as of this May, a price.

Frequency first — because before the cost, you need to know how ordinary this is.

— Tanguy

Three pieces of evidence, from how often the deal breaks, to why organisations misdiagnose it, to what the most comprehensive meta-analysis ever run on the subject says it costs. The one worth sitting with is below, along with the ledger I'd open before the next EVP goes to print.

📆 THE FREQUENCY 📆 | Violating the Psychological Contract: Not the Exception but the Norm | Robinson & Rousseau, Journal of Organizational Behavior (1994) | How often does the deal break? Robinson and Rousseau surveyed 128 graduate management alumni twice, at graduation, immediately after recruitment, and again two years later, and asked whether the obligations their employer had taken on had been honoured. 54.8% said they had been violated. Within two years, in the first job after a business degree, for a majority. The violations clustered where you would expect: training and development, compensation, promotion. They correlated with turnover and negatively with trust, satisfaction, and intention to stay. A small sample, three decades old. It's still cited because nothing has overturned it. Qualtrics' 2026 data gives the current-year version: the share of employees whose experience exceeds their expectations sits at 39%, down from 43% last year and back to where it was before the 2025 lift. Six in ten people are getting less than they expected, and that has been true every year Qualtrics has measured it. The title of the paper is the finding. Breach is not the exception. It is the norm. Which reframes the management task: not preventing breach, which you cannot, but knowing which promise broke, for whom, and when.

🔍 THE MISDIAGNOSIS 🔍 | 'Great Attrition' or 'Great Attraction'? The Choice Is Yours | McKinsey & Company (2021) | So when the deal breaks, and people leave, do employers know why? McKinsey ran two surveys at the height of the 2021 resignations (5,774 working-age employees across Australia, Canada, Singapore, the UK and the US, and 250 talent leaders split between large and mid-size firms) and asked each side the same question. The moment has passed; the gap it exposed has not. Employers named compensation, work–life balance, and poor physical and emotional health. Employees who had left named not feeling valued by their organisation (54%), not feeling valued by their manager (52%), and not feeling a sense of belonging (51%). McKinsey's own summary: employees prioritised relational factors; employers focused on transactional ones. Two explanations of the same departure. Only one of them was in the room when the retention bonus was approved. Read it as a breach report: the promise the employer thought it broke was pay. The promise the employee experienced as broken was being valued. So test your own exit data the same way: are your leaving reasons collected from the leaver, or inferred by the manager who was part of the reason?

🧾 THE PRICE 🧾 | Beyond Exchange and Affect: An Updated Meta-Analytic Review of Psychological Contract Breach | Rees, Brownell & Kickul, Journal of Business and Psychology (2026) | And what does a broken deal cost, across everything the field has measured? Published this May, the most comprehensive meta-analysis of breach ever run pooled 517 independent samples and 91 correlates: the whole literature from Zhao and colleagues' first synthesis in 2007 onward, mostly from North America and Western Europe, mostly white-collar. Take just two of its findings, the strongest and the weakest. The strongest link in the entire literature is between a broken deal and lost engagement — the discretionary effort your productivity plan is counting on. The weakest is between a broken deal and people actually leaving. These are pooled associations from a mostly cross-sectional, mostly Western, mostly white-collar literature, not a causal chain; the authors say so themselves. But the shape is not in doubt. The one thing it barely reaches is the exit door. For a CHRO that reorders the watchlist: engagement and manager relationship are the early indicators of a broken deal; attrition is the last place it will ever show.

Here are the two numbers behind that. On a scale where 1.0 is a perfect relationship, and 0 is none at all, breach and lost engagement sit at 0.75. Breach and actual departure sit at 0.11. In between: the manager relationship (0.45), burnout (0.42), and the intention to leave (0.40).

You can dismiss that last figure — turnover is lagged and hard to measure, so of course it is small. The researchers read it the other way, and the reading deserves a board's attention. When the deal breaks, people do not leave. They stay, and they stop. Rees and colleagues describe the mechanism as conservation: after a breach, people protect core task performance (0.24, modest) and withdraw everything above it. It took 517 samples and three decades of studies to establish something no exit interview will ever tell you.

Which means your best-behaved retention number and your worst engagement number can have the same cause, and most organisations will read them as two separate problems. The person who stayed is on no dashboard as a warning. She is performing to contract, exactly, and not a minute beyond. Multiply that by Robinson and Rousseau's majority.

Three weeks ago I wrote that people are not leaving; they are preparing. The meta-analysis says what the preparation looks like from the inside: they stay, and they stop. This is where the invoice I priced in #037 gets its mechanism. Disengagement is not a mood that descends on a workforce. It is what a broken deal produces, at scale, in people who have decided not to leave. And it will never show up as attrition, because attrition is the one outcome breach barely moves.

One qualification the meta-analysis itself insists on: the literature is Western, white-collar and mostly cross-sectional, and the paper is explicit that these are patterns of association, not proof. Hold the numbers loosely. Hold the shape firmly, and act on it. And be straight with your CFO about what is missing: the literature gives you a direction, not a figure. No meta-analysis converts a broken promise into euros. The shape comes from the research; the number comes from your own engagement data and your own payroll, and nobody else can produce it for you.

The practical test is one question at the next people review: if attrition is flat and engagement is falling, what promise did we stop keeping? If nobody in the room can name it, the answer is on the careers page, and the ledger below is where to look.

Low attrition is not evidence that the deal is being kept. It is the one thing a broken deal leaves intact.

The job still gets done. The person is gone.

If the Expectation Brief from last week is the problem statement, this is the audit — Robinson and Rousseau's content analysis of broken obligations, turned around to face the employer. One page, four columns, written for every promise your organisation has made out loud: name it, locate it, test it, own it. The "withdrawn" column is the addition, because most breaches today are not refusal but silent withdrawal.

Why the last step matters most: Robinson and Morrison followed 147 managers into new jobs and found that a breach becomes a felt violation when two things are present — the employee believes the employer reneged on purpose, and the process felt unfair. How you handle a promise you can no longer keep decides which of the two you get.

Your turn. Open your careers page and count the promises. Then count how many you could defend, in the words used, to someone who joined eighteen months ago. Hit reply with the two numbers; I read every one. And if you know a board that reads low attrition as good news, forward this before the next people report.

🗺️ The Ethnographer's Finding — Sunday 27 September

So far: expectations move, nobody asks where, and the deal breaks quietly. Which leaves the question underneath all three — what do people actually expect? Read the year's workforce research the way an ethnographer reads a culture, and the same ten expectations keep surfacing, in three different currencies. Next week: the framework, how it was built, and what it changes about the EVP you are about to write.

— Tanguy

Breach — the employee's recognition that a promised or expected term of the deal was not delivered. Cognitive: a judgement, not yet a feeling.

Violation — the anger, disappointment or sense of betrayal that may follow a breach; strongest when the breach is read as intentional and unfair.

The Breach Ledger — a one-page audit of every promise an organisation makes out loud, marked delivered, partly delivered or quietly withdrawn. This edition's instrument.

Silent withdrawal — a promise that has stopped being true without anyone announcing it; the most common form of breach, and the one still printed on the careers page.

Expectation currencies — the three kinds of term a deal can be written in: transactional (what I'm given), relational (how I'm treated), ideological (what it's for). Next edition's framework.

De Smet, A., Dowling, B., Mugayar-Baldocchi, M., & Schaninger, B. (2021). 'Great Attrition' or 'Great Attraction'? The choice is yours. McKinsey Quarterly, McKinsey & Company.

La Rochefoucauld, F. de. (1665). Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales. Claude Barbin.

Rees, R. R., Brownell, K. M., & Kickul, J. (2026). Beyond exchange and affect: An updated meta-analytic review and regulatory framework for psychological contract breach. Journal of Business and Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10123-1

Robinson, S. L., & Morrison, E. W. (2000). The development of psychological contract breach and violation: A longitudinal study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(5), 525–546.

Robinson, S. L., & Rousseau, D. M. (1994). Violating the psychological contract: Not the exception but the norm. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(3), 245–259.

Zhao, H., Wayne, S. J., Glibkowski, B. C., & Bravo, J. (2007). The impact of psychological contract breach on work-related outcomes: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 60(3), 647–680. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00087.x