When Employees Feel Dehumanized: Exploring Psychological Contract Breach and Counter Productive Behaviour in Call Centers

Abstract

Pakistan's call center industry, despite its remarkable economic growth, conceals a deeply troubled human reality in which chronic organizational promise violation, dehumanizing work conditions, and retaliatory employee behavior quietly corrode the workforce that sustains it. This study investigated how Psychological Contract Breach leads to Counterproductive Work Behavior among call center employees in Pakistan, proposing Feeling of Dehumanization as the psychological mechanism connecting these endpoints and Moral Disengagement as the cognitive boundary condition that amplifies their relationship. Grounded in Social Exchange Theory and employing a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design with multi-stage cluster sampling, the study collected data from call center employees across the Islamabad/Rawalpindi region. The findings confirmed that broken organizational promises erode employees' sense of personhood, and that this felt dehumanization rather than mere dissatisfaction is what ultimately drives retaliatory counterproductive conduct. Moral Disengagement was found to amplify this entire chain, meaning that employees who can readily rationalize harmful behavior convert their dehumanization-driven grievances into deviance far more readily than those with intact moral self-regulation. For Pakistani call center management, the findings carry a clear imperative: reducing counterproductive behavior requires restoring the human dignity that dehumanizing organizational practices systematically destroy. For the organizational behavior literature, this study contributes a theoretically original moderated-mediation model that extends Social Exchange Theory into an underexplored developing-country service context enriching scholarly understanding of how broken promises, stripped humanity, and silenced conscience converge to produce behaviors that consequentially undermine some of the most economically productive and psychologically vulnerable workers in Pakistan's growing service economy.