Integrating organizational climate theory: A domain-independent explanation for climate formation and function.

Organizational climate is arguably the most studied representation of the social context of organizations, having been examined as an antecedent, outcome, or boundary condition in virtually every domain of inquiry in the organizational sciences. Yet there is no commonly recognized, domain-independent theory that is used to explain why and how climates both form and affect behavior. Rather, there is a set of climate theories (and literatures) housed across a variety of divergent content domains. As a result, researchers who study climate in one domain are often unaware of climate advancements made in another. This lack of a theoretical lingua franca for climate limits our ability to understand what is known about climate and how climate research-whether domain-specific or domain-independent-can progress in a more cogent fashion. To resolve these fractures and unify climate scholarship, this article integrates existing theoretical perspectives of climate into a singular climate theory that summarizes and articulates domain-independent answers to the questions of why and how climates form and influence behavior in organizations. Using the individual drive to reduce uncertainty in meaningful social settings as the motivational mortar for this theoretical integration, we offer a needed reorientation to the field and illuminate a path forward for both future domain-specific and domain-independent climate advancements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Detecting false identities: A solution to improve web-based surveys and research on leadership and health/well-being.

A challenge for leadership and health/well-being research and applications relying on web-based data collection is false identities-cases where participants are not members of the targeted population. To address this challenge, we investigated the effectiveness of a new approach consisting of using internet protocol (IP) address analysis to enhance the validity of web-based research involving constructs relevant in leadership and health/well-being research (e.g., leader-member exchange [LMX], physical [health] symptoms, job satisfaction, workplace stressors, and task performance). Specifically, we used study participants' IP addresses to gather information on their IP threat scores and internet service providers (ISPs). We then used IP threat scores and ISPs to distinguish between two types of respondents: (a) targeted and (b) nontargeted. Results of an empirical study involving nearly 1,000 participants showed that using information obtained from IP addresses to distinguish targeted from nontargeted participants resulted in data with fewer missed instructed-response items, higher within-person reliability, and a higher completion rate of open-ended questions. Comparing the entire sample against targeted participants showed different mean scores, factor structures, scale reliability estimates, and estimated size of substantive relationships among constructs. Differences in scale reliability and construct mean scores remained even after implementing existing procedures typically used to compare web-based and nonweb-based respondents, providing evidence that our proposed approach offers clear benefits not found in data-cleaning methodologies currently in use. Finally, we offer best-practice recommendations in the form of a decision-making tree for improving the validity of future web-based surveys and research in leadership and health/well-being and other domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Climate-context congruence: Examining context as a boundary condition for climate-performance relationships.

Organizational climates are instrumental in guiding patterns of worker behavior across varied domains; yet it is noteworthy that climates do not exist in vacuums. Rather, climates are embedded within broader contexts with which they are not always congruent or harmonious. Incongruence between a climate and its context can occur when a climate emerges from strategic values that are divergent from meaningful features of the group or organization's environment. We propose, based on congruence theory, that when climates are incongruent with their context, they are less able to affect group performance. We tested a general hypothesis of climate-context congruence (CCC) by considering both the nature of the work performed by group members (CCC-work) and the predominant societal culture values (CCC-culture) as contextual boundary conditions for climate-performance associations. Using the competing values framework to conceptually distinguish climates based on their underlying values, we examined the extent to which CCC-work and CCC-culture explain variance in climate-performance relationships using meta-analytic regression. Our meta-analyses support the congruence hypothesis in several instances for both CCC-work and CCC-culture but also support a divergent compensatory perspective in others, where climate-context incongruence appears to provide offsetting performance benefits in some cases. We elaborate on the implications of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).