Every hire signs two contracts. One has a signature block. The other was drafted silently during the interviews, assembled from a careers page, an offhand line about growth, the warmth of the offer call.

Organizational psychologist Denise Rousseau spent decades studying that second one. The psychological contract: everything each side believes was agreed without anyone saying it. Two properties do most of the damage. The copies don’t match. And the contract stays invisible until it breaks. In a study Rousseau ran with Sandra Robinson, over half of employees reported a broken promise within their first two years. The employer rarely knew the promise existed.

A missed raise or a reassigned project should produce disappointment. What shows up instead is betrayal, because inside the deal, a term was violated. People rarely leave right away. They renegotiate in silence: exact effort for exact pay, nothing volunteered. The organization reads disengagement and responds with initiatives, which amend terms nobody disputed. And every change of manager rewrites the contract again, because half the deal was personal.

When both sides tell me about the same resignation, the manager calls it sudden. The person leaving dates it to a moment the manager doesn’t remember.

So ask to see the other copy. In your next one-on-one, try: “What did you sign up for here that you’ve never said out loud?” And when context shifts, a reorg, a new manager, a strategy turn, reopen the deal on purpose instead of letting it rewrite itself.

You can’t honor a contract you’ve never seen.