Measuring climate for work group innovation: development and validation of the team climate inventory

Abstract

SummaryThis paper reports the development and psychometric validation of a multi-dimensional measure of facet-speci®c climate for innovation within groups at work: the Team Climate Inventory (TCI). Brief reviews of the organizational climate and work group innovation literatures are presented initially, and the need for measures of facet-speci®c climate at the level of the proximal work group asserted. The four-factor theory of facet-speci®c climate for innovation, which was derived from these reviews, is described, and the procedures used to operationalize this model into the original version measure described. Data attesting to underlying factor structure, internal homogeneity, predictive validity and factor replicability across groups of the summarized measure are presented. An initial sample of 155 individuals from 27 hospital management teams provided data for the exploratory factor analysis of this measure. Responses from 121 further groups in four occupations (35 primary health care teams, 42 social services teams, 20 psychiatric teams and 24 oil company teams; total N 971) were used to apply con®rmatory factor analysis techniques. This ®ve-factor, 38-item summarized version demonstrates robust psychometric properties, with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. Potential applications of this measure are described and the implication of these ®ndings for the measurement of proximal work group climate are discussed. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.J. Organiz. Behav. 19: 235±258 (1998) Climate: De®nitional IssuesThe concept of climate has received considerable attention from applied psychologists and organizational sociologists over the last three decades. Numerous empirical studies have been conducted and regular reviews of the research ®ndings have appeared (the major reviews are

Spiritual Climate of Business Organizations and Its Impact on Customers’ Experience

“…There has been increasing awareness of the impact of organizational climate on employee behaviors. Studies examining specific dimensions of climate, such as innovation climate (Anderson and West, 1998), safety climate (Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996), and transfer of training climate (Tracey et al, 1995) have explained significant variance in specific employees' behaviors. In the same way current study examines impact of spiritual climate of the workplace on employees' service performance.…”

Individual Moral Development and Ethical Climate: The Influence of Person–Organization Fit on Job Attitudes

“…Second, neither study used an aggregated, collective measure of ethical work climate. Climate research indicates that climate is a shared perception of organization members and should be assessed at the group level (Anderson and West, 1998;Gonzalez-Roma et al, 2002;Hofmann and Stetzer, 1998;Liao and Rupp, 2005;Ostroff et al, 2003;Schneider, et al, 2002;Zohar, 2000;Zohar and Luria, 2005). We overcome these limitations in this study by directly comparing the ethical values of the person (i.e., cognitive moral development) with a commensurate aggregate measure of the ethical climate of the organization.…”

Towards understanding the relationship between team climate and software quality—a quasi-experimental study

“…We apply the concept of shared perceptions at the team level as a measure of the teamwork climate. Team climate has been defined as shared perceptions referring to the "proximal work group" (Anderson and West 1998). This is considered as the permanent or semi-permanent team to which individuals are assigned, whom they identify with, and whom they interact with regularly in order to perform work-related tasks.…”

“…This is considered as the permanent or semi-permanent team to which individuals are assigned, whom they identify with, and whom they interact with regularly in order to perform work-related tasks. Following Anderson and West (1998), we consider the work team as the analysis level for examining climate perceptions as well as teamwork climate preferences.…”