Abstract

Due to the deteriorating care quality in the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) social care sector, we link managerial emotional intelligence, psychological contract, and care quality in the UK’s domiciliary care sector. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 44 migrant domiciliary care workers in London, we utilized a combination of interpretative phenomenological analysis and hermeneutic phenomenology to investigate our participants lived experiences through the lens of the psychological contract literature. We found that participants faced personal challenges, poor relationships with their managers, and workplace challenges including communication, other, time management, work-life-imbalance, and safety and well-being concerns, which combine to influence their psychological contracts. Unfortunately, participants were erroneously treated as a homogeneous group who require a standardized approach to managing and staffing, despite their heterogeneity. Based on the reciprocity in psychological contracts, we conclude that, for improved care quality, employers/managers must first fulfil their obligations in the psychological contract with individual employees. This is one of the pioneering efforts to examine the relationships between managerial emotional intelligence, trust, dignity, psychological contract, employees lived experiences, and care quality of the UK’s migrant domiciliary care workers.