Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Psychological and Objective Indices of Organizational Climate

This study investigated the interrelationships among psychological and objective indices of organizational climate, and five performance measures. Subjects were 251 brokers and salespeople from 32 real estate offices. The Organizational Climate and Practices Questionnaire, Agency Climate Questionnaire, and the Survey of Organizations were the perceptual measures used, constituting 17 scales in all. Objective measures were chosen to reflect similar content areas to the subjective scales. A multitrait-multimethod matrix showed convergent and discriminant validity for some of the perceptual measures. Contrary to common findings, however, a composite of measures that yielded such validity indicated negative relationships with some performance measures. A cluster analysis of perceptual measures resulted in six clusters, and scales from a particular instrument generally tended to cluster with scales from the same instrument before clustering with scales from another instrument. Perceptual and objective variable sets were also independently factor analyzed. Component scores of objective measures accounted for more performance variance than perceptual measures. A number of problems and new directions for climate research were delineated.

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