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Article Excerpt
Researchers in organizational behaviour have long been interested in understanding employees' perceptions of the work environment and how these perceptions influence individuals' work-related attitudes and behaviours. Early researchers suggested that the social climate or atmosphere created in a workplace had significant consequences--employees' perceptions of the work context purportedly influenced the extent to which people were satisfied and perform up to their potential, which, in turn, was predicted to influence organizational productivity (e.g. Katz & Kahn, 1978; Likert, 1967; McGregor, 1960). The construct of climate has been studied extensively and has proven useful in capturing perceptions of the work context (Denisson, 1996; Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins, 2003). Climate has been described as an experientially based description of the work environment and, more specifically, employees' perceptions of the formal and informal policies, practices and procedures in their organization (Schneider, 2000).
An important distinction has been made between psychological and organizational climate (Hellriegel & Slocum, 1974; James & Jones, 1974). Individuals' own perceptions of the work environment constitute psychological climate at the individual level of analysis, whereas organizational climate has been proposed as an organizational or unit-level construct. When employees within a unit or organization agree on their perceptions of the work context, unit-level or organizational climate is said to exist (Jones & James, 1979; Joyce & Slocum, 1984). A large number of studies have consistently demonstrated relationships between psychological climate and individual-level outcomes such as satisfaction, commitment, performance and stress. Likewise, a number of cross-level studies have consistently demonstrated positive relationships between unit or organizational climate and individual outcomes such as performance, satisfaction, commitment, involvement and accidents (Ostroff et al., 2003).
While past research has greatly contributed to our understanding of relationships between psychological and organizational climate and a diverse set of individual-level criteria, there are two key limitations inherent in this work. First, studies have tended to focus on either psychological or organizational climate and have ignored the relative influence of psychological and organizational climate on individual outcomes. This is an important omission because employee attitudes and behaviours may not only be influenced by one's personal perceptions of the work environment but also by the shared perceptions of co-workers (Mathieu & Kohler, 1990). The study of emergent processes suggests that a work group's shared perceptions might influence individual attitudes and behaviours above and beyond individual perceptions of the work environment (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000).
Second, research has increasingly examined a global index representing a single strategically focused climate (e.g. a climate for service or a climate for safety) or has focused on a set of climate dimensions (Ostroff et al., 2003). Examining single dimensions or a set of independent dimensions of climate ignores the broader context in which they are operating. This is a limitation because it may be useful to examine multiple dimensions of climate together, as a system. Different organizational attributes are likely to mutually reinforce one another, making the total effect greater than the sum of individual dimensions (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004).
The current study was designed to overcome the above two limitations. Specifically, we examine the relative impact of psychological and unit-level climate on individual satisfaction and evaluate whether shared perceptions in a unit are related to an individual's level of satisfaction above and beyond their own perceptions of the climate. In addition, we adopt a configural approach for capturing organizational climate to define a more comprehensive and integrative conception of the social environment, and examine the contextual effect of organizational climate systems on individual satisfaction after controlling for individual climate perceptions.
Past research on climate
In this section, we first provide an overview of climate across levels of analysis and explain a configural approach to studying organizational climate. We then address our core predictions regarding the relative impact of psychological climate and climate systems on employee job satisfaction.
Climate across levels of analysis
Psychological and organizational climate are conceptually related to one another. Psychological climate pertains to how organizational members perceive and make sense of organizational policies, practices and procedures in psychologically meaningful terms (Schneider & Rentsch, 1988). Such perceptions can be idiosyncratic, even when individuals are exposed to the same work context and situation (James & Tetrick, 1986). Organizational climate emerges from these idiosyncratic interpretations of the work environment when individuals within a particular unit (e.g. group, organization) share similar perceptions of the situation. Only when individuals agree on their perceptions of the work environment can their individual perceptions be meaningfully aggregated to represent trait- or organizational-level climate (James, 1982; Klein et al., 2000). Therefore, the relationship between psychological and organizational climate can be described as compositional in that both constructs reference the same content but describe qualitatively different phenomena at the individual and unit levels of analysis (Chan, 1998; James, 1982). Psychological climate is a property of the individual, but when shared across individuals within a unit or organization, the aggregate of the responses represents the construct of unit or organizational climate (Glisson & James, 2002). As such, organizational climate is purported to be an emergent property because it originates in the cognition and perceptions of individuals, and is amplified through interactions and exchanges with other unit members to manifest as a higher-level collective phenomenon (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000).
Different explanations have been offered about how individuals' interpretations of the organizational environment emerge and are transformed into shared perceptions (cf. Ostroff et al., 2003; Schneider & Reichers, 1983). From a structural perspective, it has been suggested that unit or organizational characteristics such as size and structure (e.g. Payne & Mansfield, 1973) as well as consistency, clarity and salience in policies, practices and procedures (e.g. Bowen & Ostroff, 2004) can establish a common reality that provides the basis for shared perceptions. Further, through the process of attraction, selection and attrition (Schneider & Reichers, 1983) an organization is likely to comprise people with similar views and attributes so that individuals tend to perceive and experience the work environment similarly. Communications and repeated social interactions among members of the same trait or organization influence individual views and can also contribute to the evolvement of shared perceptions and meaning (e.g. Klein, Conn, Smith, & Sorra, 2001; Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999).
The notion of within-group agreement as a precondition for unit or organizational climate does not necessarily mean that there isperfect agreement among individuals on climate. In fact, most studies that have investigated group or organizational climate have found that there is still some variability in perceptions within groups (e.g. Gonzalez-Roma, Peiro, & Tordera, 2002; Lindell & Brandt, 2000; Schneider, Salvaggio, & Subirats, 2002).
A configural approach to unit-level or organizational climate
A great deal of attention has been devoted to distinguishing between the objective versus perceptual nature of climate (cf. Glick, 1985; James, Joyce, & Slocum, 1988) and between psychological and organizational climate (e.g. James & Jones, 1974; Jones & James, 1979) as well as to methodological issues pertaining to the aggregation of individual climate perceptions to represent organizational climate (e.g. Chan, 1998; Klein et al., 2000). The controversies surrounding these issues have largely been resolved (Schneider, 2000). However, little attention has been directed at how best to capture climate as a system-wide variable in an organization.
The notion that multiple climates exist within an organization has been widely accepted (e.g. Schneider, 2000). Yet, empirical research has tended to examine a single climate dimension or examine the relative importance of several dimensions of climate in a single study. Ostroff and her colleagues (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Ostroffet al., 2003) have suggested that a configural approach (Doty, Glick, & Huber, 1993; Meyer, Tsui, & Hinings, 1993) might be fruitful in this context. Configurations can broadly be defined as 'conceptually distinct characteristics that commonly occur together' (Meyer et al., 1993, p. 1175); they allow for examining multiple characteristics simultaneously while accounting for the interrelationships and interactions among them. Applied to the study of organizational climate, organizations or work units would be characterized by several distinct profiles across multiple climates. In this case, the focus of measurement shifts from examining independent climate dimensions to patterns or systems of interrelated climate dimensions.
Configural approaches have proven useful in other areas of organizational research, particularly in human resource management (HRM). Individual HRM practices have been combined to form unique patterns of practices that depict different configurations, and these different configurations have then been related to effectiveness outcomes (e.g. Delery & Doty, 1996; Doty et al., 1993; Ichniowski, Shaw, & Prennushi, 1997). This body of research is based on the assumption that different HRM practices are interrelated and interact as a system in achieving their effects. Examining single practices or sets of practices simultaneously in a regression does not allow for capturing complementary effects and interrelations among the practices--only by examining configurations across all practices can we determine whether the entire system of practices, taken together, explains more than the sum of the effects of the individual practices (Ichniowski et al., 1997). Individual practices are believed to have limited ability to impact a particular outcome. Rather, in combination, the system of practices enables organizations to achieve higher performance (Becker & Gerhart, 1996). Further, it is also assumed that some patterns or configurations can be equally effective or equifinal (Delery & Doty, 1996; Meyer et al., 1993).
Moving from HRM configurations to unit or organizational climate configurations is reasonable because climates are largely based on the perceptions of HR practices, polices and procedures (Kopelman, Brief, & Guzzo, 1990; Ostroff & Bowen, 2000). Configurations may provide a more integrative view of the overall climate in a particular unit or organization than focusing on single climates, or the independent or relative impact of several climate dimensions. Coherent patterns of multiple climates correspond to Lewin, Lippit and White's (1939) notion of climate as a 'Gestalt of the social environment'. It is also reasonable to assume that different climate dimensions interact and are interrelated in non-linear ways, which can be captured by a configural approach. Alternatively, all possible interactions among climates could be examined to account for non-linear effects. However, as the number of climates considered increases, the number of interaction terms increases exponentially, which not only requires very large sample sizes, but also makes the interpretation cumbersome.
Relative impact of psychological climate and climate systems
A great deal of research has indicated that psychological climate and organizational (or unit-level) climate is related to a variety of individual outcomes (e.g. Carr, Schmidt, Ford, & DeShon, 2003). For example, a number of studies have shown that psychological climates are related to individual satisfaction (e.g. Friedlander & Margulies, 1969; Johnson & McIntye, 1998). Results from two recent meta-analytic studies also provide strong support for this relationship (Carr et al., 2003; Parker et al., 2003). In addition, cross-level studies have demonstrated that unit-level or organizational climates are also significantly related to individual satisfaction (e.g. Joyce & Slocum, 1984; Naumann & Bennett, 2000; Ostroff, 1993). However, there is an obvious lack of research examining psychological and higher-level unit or organizational climate at the same time to ascertain their relative impacts.
Although new to the area of climate, the idea of comparing the relative importance of individual and group-level attributes on individual attitudes and behaviours has a long history in sociology and education. Sociologists, who have supported the group effects theory, have argued that groups can (and do) have effects over and beyond those of the attributes of the group members (e.g. Blau, 1960; Merton & Kitt, 1950). For example, Blau found that workers in public assistance agencies showed more service-oriented behaviour when they worked in groups with strong pro-client values than those who worked in weak pro-client-value groups, after holding constant their individual pro-client values. Blau interpreted the social values that prevailed in the work groups as 'external constraints upon the thinking and acting of its members' (p. 182). Workers were not only guided by their own values, but also sought social approval...
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