Organizational inclusion and academics’ psychological contract: Can responsible leadership mediate the relationship?

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on three Egyptian public business schools in an attempt to explore the impact of organizational inclusion on the psychological contract with academics through the mediating the role of responsible leadership. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 330 academics were contacted and given a set of questionnaires. After three follow-ups, a total of 240 responses were collected with a response rate of 72.73 percent. Multiple regressions were employed to indicate the level of variation in the types of psychological contract can be explained by organizational inclusion and responsible leadership. Findings: The findings highlighted a positive impact for organizational inclusion on the psychological contract with academics through mediating responsible leadership or, in other words, the statistical analysis showed that responsible leadership has a role in mediating the relationship between the organizational inclusion of academics and their psychological contract type. Originality/value: This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management and higher education literature in which empirical studies on the relationship between organizational inclusion, responsible leadership and the psychological contract with academics have been limited until now. This may create better research opportunities for cross-disciplinary papers by scholars of HR, higher education and leadership.