Climate strength was conceptualized within D. Chan's (1998) discussion of compositional models and the concept of culture strength from the organizational culture literature. Climate strength was operationalized in terms of within-group variability in climate perceptions-the less within-group variability, the stronger the climate. The authors studied climate strength in the context of research linking employee service climate perceptions to customer satisfaction. The hypothesis was tested that climate strength moderates the relationship between employee perceptions of service climate and customer satisfaction experiences. Partial support for the hypothesis was reported in both a concurrent and predictive (3-year) test across 118 branches of a bank. In the predictive study only the interaction of climate and climate strength predicted customer satisfaction. Implications for future research on climate and climate strength are discussed.

Employee attitude data from 35 companies over 8 years were analyzed at the organizational level of analysis against financial (return on assets; ROA) and market performance (earnings per share; EPS) data using lagged analyses permitting exploration of priority in likely causal ordering. Analyses revealed statistically significant and stable relationships across various time lags for 3 of 7 scales. Overall Job Satisfaction and Satisfaction With Security were predicted by ROA and EPS more strongly than the reverse (although some of the reverse relationships were also significant); Satisfaction With Pay suggested a more reciprocal relationship with ROA and EPS. The discussion of results provides a preliminary framework for understanding issues surrounding employee attitudes, high-performance work practices, and organizational financial and market performance.We report on a study of the relationship between employee attitudes and performance with both variables indexed at the organizational level of analysis. The majority of the research on employee attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement) has explored the attitude-performance relationship at the individual level of analysis. This is somewhat odd because the study of employee attitudes had much of its impetus in the 1960s when scholars such as Argyris (1957), Likert (1961), andMcGregor (1960) proposed that the way employees experience their work world would be reflected in organizational effectiveness. Unfortunately, these hypotheses were typically studied by researchers taking an explicitly micro-orientation and they translated these hypotheses into studies of individual attitudes and individual performance without exploring the organizational consequences of those individual attitudes (Nord & Fox, 1996;Schneider, 1985). To demonstrate how ingrained this individually based research model is, consider the research reported by F. J. Smith (1977). Smith tested the hypothesis that attitudes are most reflected in behavior when a crisis or critical situation emerges. He tested this hypothesis on a day when there was a blizzard in Chicago but not in New York and examined the relationship between aggregated department level employee attitudes and absenteeism rates for those departments. The results indicated a statistically stronger relationship in Chicago between aggregated department employee attitudes and department absenteeism rates than in New York, but Smith apologized for failure to test the hypothesis at the individual level of analysis.Research conducted under the rubric of organizational climate represents an exception to this individual-level bias. In climate research, there has been some success in aggregating individual employee perceptions and exploring their relationship to meaningful organizational (or unit-level) criteria. For example, an early study by Zohar (1980) showed that aggregated employee perceptions of safety climate are reflected in safety records for Israeli firms, and Schneider, Parkington, and Buxton ...

This article conceptually and empirically explores the relationships among manager personality, manager service quality orientation, and climate for customer service. Data were collected from 1,486 employees and 145 managers in grocery store departments (N = 145) to test the authors' theoretical model. Largely consistent with hypotheses, results revealed that core self-evaluations were positively related to managers' service quality orientation, even after dimensions of the Big Five model of personality were controlled, and that service quality orientation fully mediated the relationship between personality and global service climate. Implications for personality and organizational climate research are discussed.

PurposeThe goal of the present research is to investigate the association between observing consensual sexual behavior at work (e.g. flirting, joking) and job outcomes – specifically, job satisfaction and turnover intentions.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaires were administered about observed consensual sexual behavior and job attitudes in two separate studies of working adults. Participants in Study 1 were 113 workers from 33 workplaces in the Midwestern USA; participants in Study 2 were 242 adults working in a variety of industries.FindingsIn support of the hypotheses, results from Study 1 indicated that employees who observed more sexual behavior at work reported lower job satisfaction. Study 2 replicated this result, but only for female employees. Observed sexual behavior at work was positively related to turnover intentions for both genders.Research limitations/implicationsIn both studies, the research design was cross‐sectional, which prohibits causal inferences about the data. Second, it was not possible to assess whether the observed sexual behavior occurred between friendly peers, married coworkers, or coworkers married to other people – thus it is unclear how this factor is related to employee reactions.Practical implicationsHuman resource managers should consider formulating policies regarding consensual sexual behavior at work to guide managers in handling potentially difficult situations, such as romantic relationships between peers.Originality/valueThis research is the first to explicitly link consensual sexual behavior at work with two specific job attitudes: job satisfaction and turnover intentions.

We conducted 2 Web‐based survey studies to examine factors associated with the incidence of workplace romance. In Study 1, results based on data collected from 197 employees indicate that their degrees of perceived workplace sexualization and task interdependence were related to their observations of workplace romance. In addition, employees were most likely to report participating in a workplace romance when workplace sexualization and male–female social contact were high. In Study 2, results based on data collected from 80 employees indicate that their degrees of perceived workplace sexualization was related to their observations of workplace romance. Taken together, the results of the 2 studies suggest that work context is associated with the incidence of workplace romance.