Organizational Climate

12 Key excerpts on "Organizational Climate"

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  The SAGE Handbook of Industrial, Work & Organizational Psychology

  V3: Managerial Psychology and Organizational Approaches

  • Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Author(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  9 Organizational Culture and Climate Neal M. Ashkanasy Alana B. Dorris Introduction For decades, researchers have typically managed to confuse the terms ‘organizational culture’ and ‘Organizational Climate', including often using the terms interchangeably. In fact, although the two terms are related, there are clear differences between them (Schneider & Barbera, 2014b). To put it simply, culture is a more intangible concept (involving embedded, agreed upon values and beliefs of an organization's employees), while climate is more tangible and fluctuates based on external factors in the environment. As such, an organization's culture is made up of a set of shared assumptions (Ashforth, 1985), while climate consists of more accessible elements such as behavior and attitude (Drexler, 1977; O'Driscoll & Evans 1988; Moran & Volkwein, 1992). More directly still, culture can be defined as having to do with ‘understanding the systems of meanings, values, and attitudes’ (Ashkanasy, Wilderom, & Peterson, 2000b, p. 8) and a focus on ‘judgments and values', while Organizational Climate focuses more on ‘agreed perceptions of an organizational environment’ (Ashkanasy, 2007, p. 1028). Both organizational culture and Organizational Climate have been central to the field of industrial and organizational psychology since the early works of Lewin (1948, 1951). The terms are dissected in detail in the second edition of the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate, a manual representing many of the more recent developments in the field, and edited by Ashkanasy, Wilderom, and Peterson (2011). As in this Handbook, and similar to Ashkanasy and Jackson (2001), we recognize here the transcending and interrelated nature of the constructs of both organizational culture and Organizational Climate

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  The Power of Communication

  Managing Information in Public Organizations

  • Doris A. Graber(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Human minds can sense it but it is hard to measure precisely because it leaves few physical traces. 1 Simply defined, climate is the psychological atmosphere members of an organization perceive. Climates have been characterized as hostile or friendly, employee- or management-oriented, sexist, liberating, tense, or relaxed. Such characterizations refer to the atmosphere of an entire system whose boundaries may extend to the whole organization or may be limited to an organizational subunit or even a specific organizational activity. A variety of different climates may prevail in an organization at different times, depending on the nature and pace of its activities and on personnel factors. For example, a laid-back atmosphere may prevail at an Internal Revenue Service branch office following a hectic, high-pressure climate during the spring when most tax returns are filed. Some supervisors may be able to maintain islands of serenity in a subunit, surrounded by a sea of turmoil; others may heighten the sense of pressure. When climates are friendly and supportive or hostile and tense, trusting or mistrusting, these qualities are diffused throughout particular units largely through verbal and nonverbal communication. The end product involves widely shared perceptions, not just one individual’s reactions to the unit or its activities. Questionnaires have been the usual way to ascertain which perceptions are shared by members of an organization. Surveys are often supplemented or replaced by participant-observer techniques borrowed from anthropology or by less formal observations. 2 Because this research focuses on people’s feelings about their environment, measurements are inherently subjective. Climate measurements may involve aggregating individuals’ perceptions of various climate factors or asking them for an overall evaluation of climate conditions. Alternatively, employees may be asked to judge how others in the organization are experiencing the climate

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  International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies

  • Stewart Clegg, James R. Bailey, Stewart R Clegg, James Bailey(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Climate of Silence. Elizabeth Wolf Morrison and Francis Milliken introduced this climate, in which employees withhold information about problems in the organization. This behavior is seen to be a result of pow-erful forces that prevent employees from speaking out. Climate of Fear. Based on Joseph de Rivera’s notion of emotional climate as a phenomenon that can be pal-pably sensed, climate of fear has been operationalized by Gavin Nicholson and Neal Ashkanasy in a 13-item scale that includes items such as feeling fearful or anxious when at work. Critical Commentary and Future Directions One of the critical issues in Organizational Climate is its differentiation from organizational culture. Indeed, the Organizational Climate ——— 1029 terms culture and climate are frequently and erroneously used interchangeably in the organizational literature. These concepts are, however, clearly differen-tiated ontological perspectives. Daniel Denison, for example, has pointed out that culture refers to deeply embedded values and assumptions. Climate, on the other hand, refers to environmental factors that are con-sciously perceived and, it is important to note, are sub-ject to organizational control. In this case, as Denison notes, climate is something that can be directly influ-enced by management polities and leadership whereas culture is much more difficult to change and control. Alto Virtanen, writing in the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climat e, brings the differentiation into focus when he observes that organizational commitments are the constituents of culture but the instruments of cli-mate. Thus, culture is associated with deeply driven desires whereas climate is associated with utilitarian strategies that can change as the environment changes.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Industrial, Work & Organizational Psychology, 3v

  Personnel Psychology and Employee Performance; Organizational Psychology; Managerial Psychology and Organizational Approaches

  • Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Author(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In general, despite the established link between organizational culture, Organizational Climate, and business performance, there seems to have been more literature on the linkages between identity, change, leadership, emotion, and organizational culture and climate (Ashkanasy et al., 2011). One important topic that has more recently emerged for both climate and culture emphasizes positive organizational scholarship, which includes the banning of the expressions such as ‘organizational change’ or ‘cultural change’ (Kreiner, 2011). In effect, researchers of both organizational culture and Organizational Climate seem to be advocating a multiple perspectives approach. THE GLOBAL REACH OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND CLIMATE In order to assess the international impact of Organizational Climate and culture, it is imperative to utilize multiple perspectives and to acknowl-edge the intricate nature of the relationships between culture and climate and their components within organizational behavior. Sackmann (2011) described the findings from 55 studies, where 33 research teams studied organizational culture and climate and their effects on organizational perfor-mance in different countries around the world. Of ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND CLIMATE 199 these studies, 16 were conducted in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Greece, Sweden, and Norway and 13 in Hong Kong, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as studies in Australia, Turkey, Israel, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. Indeed, interest in organizational culture and cli-mate derived originally from studies of why Japanese organizations had such great economic success through their management techniques in the early 1980s (Brannen & Kleinberg, 2000).

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  The Climate of Workplace Relations (Routledge Revivals)

  • Ali Dastmalchian, Paul Blyton, Ray Adamson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Our intention was to create a working model of how climate fitted in to the industrial relations structure and process taking place at the establishment level, and then commence the task of devising a reliable measure of climate and applying this to as wide a range as possible of industrial relations contexts. While we were always aware of the need to take in the influences of head offices and centralizing aspects of industrial relations, our main attention was clearly directed to the workplace arenas where union representatives met management on a day to day basis to conduct industrial relations. In this, our overarching aim was to use climate as a vehicle for understanding in more detail the links between organization and other structures, industrial relations processes, and different industrial relations outcomes.

  The Climate Concept in Organizational Literature

  The concept of Organizational Climate has been widely researched over the past two decades. It has generally been viewed as a variable, or set of variables, that represents the norms, feelings and attitudes prevailing at a workplace (Payne 1971 ; Litwin and Stringer 1968 ). For many writers on Organizational Climate, the concept is seers to comprise the combined perceptions of organizational members describing the atmosphere in their organization. However, even at this general level, several problems are immediately apparent. First, the variety of ways in which the climate concept has been taken up has led to a ‘lack of boundaries differentiating what climate is from what it is not’ (Rousseau 1988 : 140). One way of overcoming this is the way we have adopted: becoming more specific as to the organizational area to which the climate concept is applied (e.g. the climate of union-management: relations).

  Second, the practice of deriving organizational-level variables (such as ‘Organizational Climate’) by aggregating individual perceptions of climate is not uncontroversial. Indeed, for some writers the issue of aggregation lies at the heart of conceptual and methodological debates on the future direction of research on climate (see, for example,

  James et al. 1988

  ; and Glick 1988 ). Roberts et al., in their discussion of aggregation problems, argue that two types of data are used in organizational research to describe characteristics of groups and organizations: ‘global data not divisible across individuals (such as organizational ownership) and aggregate data based on some composite of lower level scores’. They go on to argue that, ‘Although both global and aggregate characteristics can be used to describe groups and organizations, the use of aggregate data and concepts makes it more likely that interpreters will be confused and information lost. A future disadvantage is that aggregate data are not directly linked to the level of aggregation about which inferences are made’ (

  Roberts et al.

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  Cultivating Engaged Staff

  Better Management for Better Libraries

  • Margaret Zelman Law(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  Again, these values need to be reflected throughout all of the practices of the organization. For example, in this cli- mate, training would address issues such as interpersonal skills, and apprais- als would consider how employees support the work of their colleagues. A caring climate has been shown to motivate employees to provide better cus- tomer service as well as helping each other. The influence of management is significant in building a caring climate by modeling appropriate behavior through greater collaboration and information sharing. A third Organizational Climate is the independence climate that encour- ages individuals to make decisions based on their own personal values and principles of justice, with minimal influence from the organization. This requires a significant investment in recruitment to ensure that selection is based on ensuring that the employee’s values are congruent with that of the organization. Performance management must include expectations for decisions made in the best interest of the organization and its customers. Managers must provide enough leeway for employees to make decisions based on personal values of justice, morality, and respect regardless of organizational context. If all human resource processes are congruent with this climate, the organization invests less in monitoring. Law and code-based climates are based on the view that decision making relies on external codes such as religion texts, laws, or professional codes of conduct. These tend to occur in highly regulated professional organizations such as engineering and medicine. For a professional organization, this cli- mate increases the perception of legitimacy by customers that results in a more positive image. This would be a challenging climate for a library or information organization due to the proliferation of codes of conduct and the voluntary nature of compliance with them.

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  The Diversity Scorecard

  • Edward Hubbard(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As mentioned in an earlier chapter, making a commitment to diversity means more than striving for immediate results such as improved demographics. Employees must feel welcomed and supported as part of the organization’s climate and culture. They need to know that the organization has systems, processes, and people in place to help give them the best possible chance for success and allow them to build an invigorating career.

  Collecting Data

  Collecting data for the workplace culture/climate index requires examining a variety of sources that will shed light on the organization’s culture and climate. These sources can include some of the following:

  • Level of organizational commitment from employees
  • Aspects of climate
  • Aspects of culture
  • Employee complaints
  • Number of grievances
  • Types of discrimination
  • Work life initiatives and balance
  • Leadership behaviors and practices
  • Diversity work team interactions

  Let’s examine a few of these sources in more detail. Organizational culture is “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments” (Schein, 1996 ). This definition highlights two important characteristics of organizational culture: (1) it influences our behavior at work; and (2) it operates on two levels, which vary in terms of outward visibility and resistance to change.

  At the less visible level, culture reflects the values shared among organizational members. At Healthco, a UK-based international pharmaceuticals company, the difference between the two levels became very clear when a corporate culture change was implemented. The first part of the change process, focused on behavior (e.g., teamwork, innovation), is extremely well embedded within the organization. The second stage, the issue of a values statement, became far less integrated in the company’s culture (Hope and Hendry, 1995

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  Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

  Evidence-based Lessons for Creating Sustainable Organizations

  • Steve M. Jex, Thomas W. Britt, Cynthia A. Thompson, Cynthia A Thompson(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Often that most enduring organizational culture change occurs only in response to extreme environmental conditions. An important factor to consider when examining organizational culture is its impact on important outcomes. Not a great deal of empirical research has been done on the effects of organizational culture, most likely because multiple organizations are needed to do such research. Nevertheless, empirical research that exists has shown that organiza- tional culture may impact several important outcomes, including performance, attraction and recruitment of employees, employee retention, and employee satisfaction and well-being. As with the definition of culture itself, organizational researchers have also questioned many of these findings due to the lack of construct validity of some existing organizational culture measures. Finally, there is limited evidence that national culture does have an impact on organizational culture. This is an important issue since most large organizations are multinational. In future organizational cul- ture research, this issue deserves much greater attention. Organizational research- ers should especially focus on the align- ment between national and organizational cultures, and the potential consequences of misalignment. Organizational Climate represents the way employees psychologically experience the organization they are in. Climate develops for several reasons, but the key factors tend to be the culture of the organization, the poli- cies and procedures within the organization, and the frequency of communication among employees. Although early organizational cli- mate research focused on the overall climate within an organization, termed molar climate, more recent research had focused on climates related to important organizational outcomes and to important organizational processes.

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  Corporate Assessment (Routledge Revivals)

  Auditing a Company's Personality

  • Adrian Furnham, Barrie Gunter(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Taylor and Bowers (1972) ‘Survey of Organizations’ includes twenty-two items designed to measure Organizational Climate. Smallest space analysis revealed five principal clusters, subsuming thirteen items. These are labelled: technological readiness, human resources primacy, communication flow, motivational conditions, and decision-making practices.

  Payne and Pheysey (1971) described a business organization climate index. Three hundred items from Stern’s (1967) Organizational Climate index were reduced through content and factor analysis to 192 items which compromised the measure. These are distributed across 245 scales, labelled as follows: leader’s psychological distance, questioning authority, egalitarianism, management concern for employee involvement, open mindedness, emotional control, physical caution, practical orientation, future orientation, scientific and technical orientation, intellectual orientation, job challenge, task orientation, industriousness, altruism, sociability, interpersonal aggression, homogeneity, rules orientation, administrative efficiency, conventionality, readiness to innovate, variety in physical environment, and orientation to wider community. Payne and Mansfield (1973) describe a 157-item revision of this measure, covering twenty of the original scales.

  Jones and James (1979) describe a 145-item psychological climate questionnaire (James and Jones, 1974). This has a very broad focus, covering perceptions of jobs and work roles, as well as organizational properties, aspects of leadership style, and trust. Developed and worded for use with navy personnel, its thirty-five scales fall into four sets. The first group is concerned with perceived job and role characteristics; the second set of scales reflects leadership style; the third set of scales is focused on the work group; the final scales are concerned with the sub-system or organization as a whole.

  A sixty-four-item Organizational Climate description questionnaire was introduced by Halpin and Croft (1963). It contains eight scales, namely disagreement, hindrance, esprit, intimacy, aloofness, production emphasis, trust, and consideration. The instrument was developed for educational organizations and the item content reflects this; the first four scales refer to teachers’ behaviour and experience, the last four to the principal’s behaviour. Lawler, Hall, and Oldham (1974) describe a fifteen-item Organizational Climate questionnaire. Each item is in the form of a sevenpoint semantic differential scale, and factor analysis suggested a five-dimensional solution. The five scales are labelled as competent, responsible, practical, risk-oriented, and impulsive. A three-factor solution apparently based on the same data is described by Hall and Mansfield (1975).

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  Leveraging the Impact of Culture and Climate

  Deep, Significant, and Lasting Change in Classrooms and Schools (School Improvement Ideas for Driving Change and Creating a Positive School Culture)

  • Steve Gruenert, Todd Whitaker(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Solution Tree Press

    (Publisher)

  cultural competence (the ability to understand, appreciate and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one’s own; DeAngelis, 2015). Organizational culture is a local phenomenon that occurs when a group of people spend significant time together. They may be close physically or even virtually—whatever environment facilitates the development of a group-based mentality. Each individual member conglomerates his or her values together with others’ values and all members mold them to form a new, teamwide ideology that can be difficult to break through.

  Even when it comes to something as rigid as religion, different churches in the same denomination can have very different practices. While this may depend on the leadership within individual congregations, influential members, unwritten rules, and social cliques often affect practices—all of which can last far beyond an individual leader.

  Now, let’s revisit the past to learn how culture and climate became so central to school effectiveness. Looking through educational leadership textbooks from decades past, the topic of culture seems to become more popular with each passing year. In the 1960s, culture might have received a paragraph in a book—then coined as ethos— while now you find whole chapters and even numerous books dedicated to culture. Many books have been published on organizational culture, most of which come from the business and management fields (see anything by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Edgar H. Schein, starting in 1985). Businesses, organizations, and sports teams all regularly note the impact of culture on their successes or lack thereof. The term culture has become quite vogue in 2021.

  The world of education validated the concept of culture as a major factor when school effectiveness and school improvement became hot topics in the late 1970s, with works from former Yale University psychology professor emeritus Seymour B. Sarason (1971) and former University of Chicago education professor Dan C. Lortie (1975). The literature began to discriminate between effective cultures and ineffective cultures with writings from University of California Berkeley education policy professor Judith Warren Little (1990), author Susan J. Rosenholtz (1991), and education reform authority Michael Fullan (1997). Then in 1999, coauthors Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson (1999) provided one of the best books on school culture and how it works (Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership

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  Meeting the Innovation Challenge

  Leadership for Transformation and Growth

  • Scott Isaksen, Joe Tidd(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Of all the factors that influence climate outlined in the earlier chapters, leadership behavior is generally the most potent. Ekvall and his colleagues have found that leadership behavior accounts for a great deal of the variance on climate assessments.[3] In one study, they found a direct rela- tionship among leadership, climate and productivity (Figure 13.1). When they removed (partialed out) the variance from climate, they found a very weak direct relationship between leadership and productivity. Although this was a very preliminary study, it does raise an interesting and provocative issue. Perhaps the most important thing a leader of any organization does to obtain productive results is create the climate and working atmosphere. Working to deliberately create a climate that is conducive to innovation and change is emerging as a critical factor for organizational survival and growth.[4] There may be differences in both the degree and style of creativity demanded from employees who face diverse tasks and desired outcomes, but there is an emerging consensus that there is room – in nearly every job – for more creativity. Creating a working atmosphere that allows for creative behavior is one of the biggest opportunities for those who choose to meet the innovation challenge. One example supporting the need for deliberate climate creation comes from the PwC innovation and growth survey described in Chapter 1. As you may remember, those organizations earning the highest percentage of revenue from new products and services demonstrated that they were more effective on three capabilities. They demon- strated a more inclusive and creative kind of leadership, took deliberate steps to manage their creative and idea management processes, and did not leave their climate or working atmosphere to chance. The researchers also studied the idea management processes in a representative set of organizations in the sample.

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  A Climate of Success

  • Roderic Gray(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Assessing Organizational Climate Some people, especially at work, like to measure everything, because this makes them feel as though they are in control. In reality, for everything that’s accurately measured, there’s some big and blobby unknown quan-tity lurking just around the corner. Guy Browning, How to … Measure, 2006 I wholeheartedly agree with Guy Browning’s views on measurement and I try to seize any opportunity to convince managers that measurement isn’t an end in itself; its value is as a tool to be used in the process of assessment. Measurement, in one form or another, features to some extent in most efforts to assess the climate in organizations, and a variety of tools and techniques has been developed to help in this. First, I need to say something about the way, or ways, in which research can be conducted in organizations in order to tell us something useful about climate, which is a subjective construct, existing in the perceptions of the people who experience it. It may seem as though performance, in contrast, is an objective concept in organizational life, and therefore easily measurable. In some respects this is clearly true. We can count how many units of product have been produced over a given time. We can check the share price, or note progress against a production or project schedule. But performance becomes much less easily assessable when we want to know how well people are performing some of the less well-defined elements of their jobs

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