Organizational climate profiles: Identifying meaningful combinations of climate level and strength.

Abstract

According to situation strength theory, organizational climate should have a stronger effect on group behavior when members’ perceptions of the climate are both unambiguous (i.e., very high or very low) and shared than when they are more ambiguous and less shared. In the organizational climate literature, this proposition is typically examined by testing the interaction between climate level (i.e., mean) and strength (i.e., variability); surprisingly, the preponderance of empirical research testing this interaction does not support this theoretical expectation. This may be because the traditional variable-centered approach fails to consider the possibility of overlooked subpopulations consisting of unique combinations of climate level and strength, creating distinct climate profiles. To address this issue, we use a group-centered conceptualization and analyses (i.e., latent profile analysis) to examine the extent to which 302 workgroups (Sample 1) and 107 organizations (Sample 2) evidence statistically and practically meaningful climate profiles. Results revealed four to six distinct climate profiles across multiple climate types were differentially associated with theoretically relevant outcomes, including objective financial measures. Consistent with situation strength theory, groups with strong and favorable profiles tended to have more positive outcomes, whereas groups with weaker, less favorable profiles tended to have less positive outcomes. In contrast, the traditional variable-centered approach was generally unsupportive of an interaction between climate level and strength. Overall, these findings provide evidence that the group-centered approach is a more sensitive statistical modeling technique for testing a fundamental tenet of situation strength theory in the context of organizational climate research.

Latent profiles of ethical climate and nurses’ service behavior

“…28 Accordingly, we named Profiles 2–4 based on their quantitively distinct in climate level. 24 As shown in Figure 1 and Table 4, Profile 2 consisted of 173 participants (19.9% of the sample), which was characterized by high levels of all five types of ethical climates (caring [M = 4.121, SD = 0.708]; law and code [M = 4.434, SD = 0.565]; rules [M = 4.487, SD = 0.567]; instrumental [M = 3.009, SD = 1.016]; and independence climate [M = 2.867, SD = 1.080]), so this profile was named high ethical climate . For Profile 3, 3.6% of the total sample (31 clinical nurses) have the lowest levels of perceptions of all five types of ethical climate: caring (M = 1.629, SD = 0.387); law and code (M = 3.379, SD = 1.275); rules (M = 3.548, SD = 1.395); instrumental (M = 2.432, SD = 0.823); and independence climate (M = 2.307, SD = 0.935); we named this profile low ethical climate .…”

“…28 Accordingly, we named Profiles 2-4 based on their quantitively distinct in climate level. 24 As shown in Figure 1 Thus, for Research Question 1, we identified three profiles of hospital ethical climate that were generally similar quantitatively (although there were differences among the levels), with one profile designated as high normative and low egoism that was observed to be qualitatively different, which was with significant shape differences.…”

“…1 Furthermore, the variable-centered method assumes that all individuals from a sample under the climate are drawn from a single population. 24 This cannot fully reflect the fact that nurses experience each ethical climate differently in practice. 13 According to Gabriel et al, 25 latent profile analysis (LPA) provides an innovative approach for answering a variety of substantive research questions that is frequently not possible with more traditional methods, such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression, cluster analysis, and factor analysis, and it can assist nurse researchers in understanding multifaceted relationships, intricate patterns, and clusters of symptoms that are needed to help guide interventions.…”

How genuine is your diversity climate? A new typology highlighting the emergence of specious diversity climates

“…We align our definition specifically with the fairness‐and‐discrimination perspective due to its relevance for social categorization diversity (differences in observable attributes) and the potential for adverse impact on the individual due to demographic difference (e.g., McKay et al, 2008; Mor Barak et al, 1998). We are specifically concerned with perceptions of shared rather than individual experiences within the unit (i.e., perceptions of how employees in the unit are treated, as opposed to how I as an individual am treated) to more closely align with the construct of climate (Schneider et al, 2017), and we define climate as the distribution of employee perceptions as opposed to a shared perception to avoid overlooking useful information provided by units in which perceptions of the unit are not shared (Chan, 1998; as tends to happen in climate research; Gonzàlez‐Romà & Hernàndez, 2014; He et al, 2023; Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Dwertmann et al (2016) recommended that operationalizations of the fairness‐and‐discrimination perspective include attention to diversity‐specific management practices, fair implementation of personnel practices, and commitment to diversity (see Ward et al, 2022 for an example of such items used specifically with the work unit as referent).…”

“…Further, units with low levels of employee agreement in their perceptions of the climate are typically discarded from analyses altogether (Lebreton et al, 2005); thus, units in which some individuals perceive more discrimination and less fairness than others (in other words, units that perhaps have less supportive diversity climates) are often not actually studied. Whereas scholars are beginning to incorporate measures of intra‐unit perception dispersion into diversity climate studies (e.g., Reinwald et al, 2019), more attention is needed to understand the meaning of the patterns of variability (Chan, 1998; Gonzàlez‐Romà & Hernàndez, 2014; Gonzàlez‐Romà & Peirò, 2014; He et al, 2023; Keeler et al, 2023) to ensure that minority perspectives within a unit are not distorted or subgroup climates missed. As an example, consider the unit in which all members perceive the climate to be supportive of diversity, except for the one member who is demographically different from others.…”