Work Climates. An Interactionist Perspective.

Abstract

The literature on work climates is reviewed and summarized and, then, an hypothesis about the etiology of climates is presented. The literature summary reveals that in the past fifteen years five kinds of conceptual progress and four kinds of methodological progress have been made. It is noted that collectively these advances define a 'climate approach' to understanding organizational behavior. The hypothesis suggests that work climates emerge from the naturally occurring patterns of the goal-oriented interactions of people with each other and (changing) facets of their work environment. This hypothesis rests on two important interactionist assumptions: (1) people tend to be attracted to, selected by, and leave from organizations yielding settings characterized by particular kinds of people; and (2) separating the nature of person from the nature of setting (perceiver from perceived) is difficult. Thus, it is suggested, work climates are indeed perceptions of organizational processes but in different settings different climates will exist because different kinds of people will exist there. (Author)