Psychological climate: Dimensions and relationships of individual and aggregated work environment perceptions

Abstract

The present study attempted to develop a comprehensive measure of work environment perceptions and to investigate the appropriateness of using aggregated perceptual scores to describe subunit or organizational conditions. Dimensions underlying these work environment perceptions (i.e., psychological climate) were explored and related to a variety of situational, positional, and individual measures. Results indicated that: (a) five of the six dimensions found to underlie the perceptions of 4315 US Navy enlisted men were generalizable to comparison samples of firemen (n = 398) and health care managers (n = 504); (b) use of aggregated individual perceptions to describe subunit conditions was appropriate only for homogeneous subunits (i.e., divisions); (c) aggregated scores were significantly related to division context, structure, and personnel composition; and (d) division structure, context, personnel composition, and aggregated perception scores were significant predictors of division performance.