The employee-based core competencies of the corporations increasingly become the crucial non-imitable source for sustainable competitive advantages, especially with regard to knowledge creation and technological innovation. The paper discusses generic modes of psychological contracts between companies and their employees and the impact of these contracts on corporate core competencies. Further, it analyzes how the long-term, ‘interdependent’ psychological contract in Japanese and German corporations is changing now as well as possible consequences of this change. Finally, the paper identifies new tasks of the human resource management (HRM) in both countries which result from this change and are essential for the competitive strength of the corporations.