The present paper utilizes the ideological perspective of psychological contracts to describe how and why team leader vision communication can ultimately lead to lower team meaningfulness of work. We explain how leaders who fail to commit to the proposed vision breach the ideological contract by threatening a valued purpose and its coinciding ideological rewards. This relationship is dependent on the trait of leader behavioral integrity, as ascribed by followers, such that it is weakened when leaders are perceived as having high behavioral integrity, and strengthened when leaders are perceived as having low behavioral integrity. Once breach occurs, we suggest teams perceive lower significance in their tasks and form shared perceptions of lower meaningfulness of work. We propose this relationship is also dependent upon contextual factors, namely, team outcome assessments related to the magnitude and the implications associated with the breach. In this case, the relationship will be strengthened when teams perceive high breach magnitude and/or implications and weakened when teams perceive low breach magnitude and/or implications. Together, we describe the conditions that lead to team leader communication resulting in detrimental team effects, contradicting its original purpose.
