A note on organizational climate

ORGANIZATIONAL BEIIA¥10R AIgD t I U ~ I A I g PERFOR]FfANCE

9, 120-125 (1973)

A Note on Organizational Climate ROBERT M. GIJION Bowling Green State University ~

The idea of "organizational climate" appears to refer t o a n attribute, or set of attributes, of the work environment. The idea of a "perceived organizational climate" seems ambiguous; one can not be sure whether it implies an attribute of the organization or of the perceiving individual. If it refers to the organization, then measures of perceived organizational climate should be evaluated in terms of the accuracy of the perceptions. If it refers to the individual, then perceived organizational climate may simply be a different name for job satisfaction or employee attitudes. The immediate stimulus for these comments is the report by Pritchard and K a r a s i e k (1973) entitled " T h e Effects of Organizational Climate on Managerial J o b Performance and J o b Satisfaction." However, this is more a note on a construct t h a n on a specific article; these comments are not particularly concerned with the literature survey (extensive but uncritical), the research design (generally admirable in conception), the writing style (a model of clarity), or points made in discussion (only some of which will be quarreled with) in the Pritchard and K a r a s i c k article. The article serves only as a point of focus for expressing certain concerns and a long-enduring sense of disquiet a b o u t research on organizational climate. The construct (or, perhaps, family of constructs) implied b y the ~erm, organizational climate, m a y be one of the most i m p o r t a n t to enter the thinking of industrial-organizational psychologists in m a n y years. Ecological problems are at the fore in contemporary social concern; psychological pollution of the work environment m a y be as serious a source of some kinds of h u m a n misery as chemical pollution of rivers. Discovery and development of environmental factors at work t h a t facilitate h u m a n well-being and productivity deserve high priority. Psychology has long contended t h a t individual behavior is a function of a pervasive environment, y e t industrial psychology has y e t to define or to isolate invariant environmental variables t h a t impinge upon all ' At this writing, on leave of absence with the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ. 120 Copyright O 1973 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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those who work. Insofar as a given organization presents stimulus characteristics that differ from those of other organizations, those characteristics should be described, measured, and classified. Subsequent to such basic scientific description, they should be studied for possible causal, predictive, or moderating effects on group and individual behavior. The development of any construct demands a kind of zig-zag pattern of research, mixing purely descriptive and hypothesis testing studies. I t also demands that investigators occasionally sit back and think about their constructs, the appropriateness of research directions, and the basic logic of their endeavors. Pritchard and Xarasick offer an opportunity for such thought. The concept of organizational climate is undoubtedly important, but it also seems to be one of the fuzziest concepts to come along in some time. Initially, it seems to have grown from a sociological analogy to physical climate; as such it may have been seen as an attribute of an organization or organizational unit or system, much as variables of physical climate are seen as attributes of the physical world. However, most psychologists (even those strongly influenced by sociology or the physical sciences) are more experienced and more comfortable in thinking about attributes of individuals. And so the concept of "perceived organizational climate" seems to have become more popular than attempts to study or to manipulate the attributes of organizations more directly. The shift seems more a function of methodological convenience than of deliberate intention to move to a different, construct; the result is semantic confusion over precisely who or what is the subject of study. Thus, Pritehard and Karasick sometimes identify "climate" as a main effect or interacting effect on behavior in language implying something !'out there" (external to the person) and sometimes (with greater precision) write of "an individt~al's perception of his climate" as the variable producing those effects. To Pritchard and Karasick, the former usage may have been simply a convenient shorthand; to many in the field, however, there seems to be real confusion over whether "climate" refers to attributes of organizations or attributes of people. In their review, Pritehard and Karasick cite without special differentiation such diverse research as perception questionnaires (Pace & Stern, 1958), experimental manipulations of stimuli (Frederiksen, 1966), or objective measurement of organizational variables (Evan, 1963). The point may be clarified, while introducing another, by pursuing the physical analogy. Objective measures of physical climate (i.e., of something external to the people who experience it) are possible and commonplace. One may examine an almanac and find that climatologists have recorded variations in daily mean temperature in, for example, Cleveland

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and Honolulu; the mean of the daily mean temperature is perhaps higher in Honolulu than in Cleveland, while the variance of such readings is higher in Cleveland. At any given point in time and at any given location, the climatologist can observe both temperature and wind velocity. From these measures he can compute a "derived score" to measure objectively a psychological variable known as the wind-chill factor. The wind-chill factor is logically related to the human experience of being cold, but it is nevertheless empirically a function of objective measures of external climatic variables. In the winter months, when temperatures in Cleveland dip below zero and those in Honolulu swoop below 70 °, at any given instant of asking, using any given instrument for recording perceptions, a specific bather on the windward side of Oahu may report feeling colder than a specific pedestrian in Cleveland. The actual perception of being cold is clearly something different from the wind-chill factor, and they probably have distinguishably different networks of correlates. The one is an attribute of a person, the other an attribute of the world he is in. They differ, but they should be related to some degree. This suggests a second point, the problem of construct validation for a measure of perceived organizational climate. Pritchard and Karasick have, in this writer's opinion, done a better iob than most because they use an external criterion of what is an objective environmental attribute. That is, they have used outside consultants' agreement on reality as a criterion against which to compare employee's perceptions. Returning to the analogy, one should expect perceptions of coldness, if they are reasonably accurate, to agree rather well with objective measurements such as the wind-chill factor. There is, of course, no guarantee that perceptions will be accurate in this sense. When we move away from the analogy to questions of organizational climate, questions of the accuracy of perception become very confusing. The construct validity of a measure of perception of a climatic variable is related to the question of the accuracy of those perceptions, i.e., the accuracy of predicting (or identifying) an objective measure of the reality being perceived. Unless there is such an objective, external measure of a characteristic of the environment itself, the question of accuracy of perception cannot be answered. Neither can two fundamentally more important questions: (1) Of what antecedent variables is accuracy of perception a function? (2) What future behavior or states can be predicted from knowledge of the accuracy perception? The nature of a perception may itself be of some interest, of course, i.e., questions of accuracy may be ignored. This is, in fact, the history of the study of perceived organizational climate. If one is interested in

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an attribute of the organization, however, one ignores the question of accuracy at his peril. If one is interested in an attribute of the individual, then accuracy is of little or no concern. Where accuracy is of little interest, there is a third issue in the study of organizational climate. If one is primarily interested in the measure of an attribute of individuals, with no external reference such as accuracy, then he faces a different peril: the likelihood of having done nothing more creative than rediscovery of the wheel. That is, he may be measuring the same old constructs under new names. Pritchard and Karasick demonstrate this. They hypothesized that "climate" is related to job satisfaction and, in fact, found their measure of it more related to job satisfaction than to performance. "Climate" is, however, operationally defined as perceived climate and was measured using an instrument developed in part by culling items from other measures of perceived climate and of job satisfaction. It was earlier observed (Campbell et al., 1970) that this is typieal; i.e., that most measures of perceived climate have borrowed heavily from job satisfaction questionnaires. Campbell himself worked with Pritehard to develop the questionnaire in the Pritchard and Karasick study; they may, therefore, have been unusually careful to select only those items "that appeared to be related to the psychological atmosphere." Nevertheless, the independence of the resulting climate measure and any standard measure of job satisfaction is still open to question. The literature on iob satisfaction contains a useful parallel. Lawshe and Nagle (1954) demonstrated a relationship between mean sarisfaction with supervisor and unit productivity. Brayfield and Crockett (1955) discounted the finding by calling the Lawshe-Nagle questionnaire a description of objective reality (i.e., of actual supervisory behavior) rather than a measure of satisfaction. Considering this objection, Guion and Robins (1964) developed one set of items as descriptive of supervisory behavior as possible and another set as purely affective and nondescr~ptive as possible. The two correlated .79, confirming the well-established but currently forgotten fact that perception can be used to infer attitude. More positive evidence that perceived organizational climate as a measure of an individual attribute is little more than a new name for an old topic is in a dissertation by Johannesson (1971). Ninety items selected from existing measures of perceived organizational climate were cluster analyzed, as were the items of the Job Descriptive Index (Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969) and the Science Research Associates Employee Attitude Survey. Cluster scores for the three questionnaires were themselves cluster analyzed; nearly every resulting dimension was defined

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by a score from the JDI, another from the SRA, and still another from the organizational climate questionnaire. In short, when the construct used is perceived organizational climate, the Pritchard and Karasick hypothesis reduces to "job satisfaction measured by one method is a function of job satisfaction measured by another one," and it is not a surprising finding that one measure of job satisfaction is more closely related to another than either is to an operationally independent measure of job performance. It simply is not convincing in the face of such a tautology to claim, as they do, that "the trend for organizational climate to be more highly related to individual job satisfaction than to individual performance holds important significance." It needs to be stressed that this is an example of a common semantic confusion producing confusion in research and in the interpretation of data: The data upon which this statement is based are tautological, in that they refer to perceived climate; the discussion in which this statement is embedded is referring to the external reality and remains an important hypothesis for investigation. Unrelieved negativism is unpleasant. These comments are not intended to disparage work on organizational climate or even on perceptions of organizational climate; they are intended merely to disparage tautological operational definitions of constructs. Perceptions of organizational climate, whether by employees or by consultants, can be used as estimates (by experts) of attributes of organizations. An appropriate methodology may be described in its simplest terms through the use of dichotomies, in which a statement of an organizational attribute, or the perception of one, is treated as if it either were or were not true. A list of such statements can be presented to all of the members of a given organizational unit and the frequency of endorsement determined. The items to be treated as genuinely descriptive are those in which the frequency of endorsement either is not significantly different from 100% or not significantly different from 0%. The importance of such a paradigm is that it clearly implies the study of attributes of the organization, even where individuals' perceptions constitute the agency through which the attributes are determined. Logically, this is quite similar to the Pritchard and Xarasick criterion wherein two consultants' perceptions, where they agreed, were used to select the organizations to be studied. One may wonder whether the "climate" for research is such that a study could be published using an N of 2 to define organizational characteristics. If so, it would be more accurately described as "unique and particularly interesting" if the perceptions of the consultants rather

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t h a n those of the m a n a g e r s h a d been c o m p a r e d to measures of job satisfaction and performance. REFERENCES B~YFIELD, A. H., & CROeF~ET~, W. tI. Employee attitudes and employee performance. Psycholoigcal Bulletin, 1955, 52, 396-424. CAMPBELL,J. P., DU~NETT~, M. D., LAWLE~,E. E. I I I , & WEICK, K. E. Managerial behavior, per]ormance, and e]]ectiveness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. EvA~, W. M. Indices of the hierarchical structure of industrial organizations. Management Science, 1963, 9, 468-477. FREDERIXSE~, N. Some effects of organizational climate on administrative performanee. Princeton, N J: Educational Testing Service, Research Memorandum RM66-21, 1966. GvloN, R. M., & ROBINS, J. E. A note on the Nagle attitude scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 1964, 48, 29-30. JO~A~NESS0~-, R. E. Job satisfaction and perceptually measured organizational climate: An investigation of redundancy. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 1971. (Dissertation Abstracts, 1971, 32, 2429B.) LAWSHE, C. H., & NAGLE,B. F. Productivity and attitude toward supervisor. Journal o] Applied Psychology, 1954, 37, 159-162. PACE, C. R., & STERN, G. G. An approach to the measurement of psychological characteristics of college environments. Journal o] Educational Psychology, 1958, 49, 259-277. PUI~C~ARD, R. D., & KARASlCX, B. W. The effects of organizational climate on managerial job performance and iob satisfaction. Organizational Behavior and Human Per]ormance, 1973, 9, 126-146. S~ITg, P. C., I(E~DALL,L. M., & H~LIN, C. L. The measurement o] satisfaction in worl~ and retirement: A strategy ]or the study o] attitudes. Chicago: IRandMcNally, 1969. RECEIVED: M a y 28, 1972