Date of Award

Fall 2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

First Advisor

Steven Toaddy

Abstract

The study of work climate has expanded our understanding of how context impacts individuals in the workplace. While most climate research has focused on single- or multi-faceted organizational climates and how they directly impact the individual employee, little has been done to understand the influence of multiple, competing work climates on employee behavior. The purpose of this study was to examine the multiple, competing climates perspective (Schneider et al., 2013) to better understand the influence of context on an employee’s work-related attitudes. This dissertation begins with a brief review of the climate literature and its existing challenges, highlighting the importance of psychological climate, and highlights ethical and service climate as two optimal candidates for studying multiple competing climates. I then argued for adopting Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s (1981) competing values framework (CVF) to provide a theoretical model for understanding how multiple, competing climates can impact work attitudes.

To test the viability of this theory, I solicited 690 participants with at least one year of professional experience through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and asked them to complete a questionnaire including measures of ethical climate, service climate, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment to empirically test the proposed theoretical framework. I used a structural equation modeling approach to test iv hypothesized relationships between each climate and each job attitude, as well as the proposed moderation hypotheses where climates may compete to uniquely impact employee job attitudes. I began with a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the latent factor structure of my measurement model and followed with latent path moderation analysis to test the hypothesized competing climates framework. While there was limited fit for the revised measurement model, the results of this study failed to support the hypothesized competing climates framework. A review of this study’s competing climates research, limitations, and opportunities for future research are discussed.

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