Are the costs worth the benefits? Shared perception and the aggregation of organizational climate ratings

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Stacey R. Kessler
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2415

POINT‐COUNTERPOINT

Are the costs worth the benefits? Shared perception and the

aggregation of organizational climate ratings

Stacey R. Kessler

M. A. Leven School of Management,

Entrepreneurship & Hospitality Coles College

of Business, Kennesaw State University,

Kennesaw, Georgia

Correspondence

Stacey R. Kessler, Ph.D., Kennesaw State

University, Kennesaw, GA.

Email: skessle4@kennesaw.edu

Summary

A definitional component of organizational climate is the focus on employees' shared

perceptions of the focal climate domain. To operationalize the notion of sharedness,

researchers typically aggregate employees' domain‐specific climate perceptions to a

higher level and justify this aggregation using quantitative indices of agreement. In

the current paper, I argue that although accounting for sharedness among employees

can provide some valuable insight, our overreliance on sharedness obscures some of

the very organizational phenomena of interest. I discuss this issue by focusing on four

costs of making unfounded assumptions regarding sharedness: (a) Aggregation

assumes individual differences are a function of random error; (b) aggregation

assumes that social situations are uniform across employees; (c) aggregation assumes

that the unit of analysis is clear‐cut; and (d) aggregation assumes the group mean is

meaningful. I argue that researchers carefully need to weigh the costs of violating

these assumptions against the expected benefits of aggregating employees' climate

perceptions, recognizing that sometimes employees' perceptions (i.e., psychological

climate) might provide greater insight into phenomena of interest. Although I discuss

these costs within the context of organizational climate research, these arguments

apply to other research areas where individual perceptions are aggregated (e.g.,

research on leadership and teams).

KEYWORDS

aggregation, organizational climate, perception

1|INTRODUCTION

Organizational climate is a prolific area of study in the organizational

sciences literature and is commonly defined as “the shared percep-

tions of and the meaning attached to the policies, practices, and pro-

cedures employees experience and the behaviors they observe

getting rewarded and that are supported and expected”(Schneider,

Ehrhart, & Macey, 2013, p. 362). Researchers (e.g., Schneider et al.,

2013) have emphasized the shared nature of the organizational

climate variable and to that end have focused on aggregating individ-

ual climate perceptions of domain‐specific climate variables (e.g.,

safety, justice, and ethics) to create a group or organizational level cli-

mate variable. However, I argue that our strong focus on the shared

aspect of the climate variable has significant costs that we often

ignore and/or underemphasize. These costs likely impede our under-

standing of important organizational phenomena. Therefore, in the

current paper, I discuss four assumptions underlying aggregation and

invite readers to reconsider the role and value of individual employee's

perceptions of climate (i.e., psychological climate).

This paper will be organized as follows. First, I will briefly review

the literature that led to aggregating organizational climate

Note: Portions of this manuscript were completed under a previous affiliation, Montclair State

University.

Received: 28 May 2019 Revised: 2 September 2019 Accepted: 5 September 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2415

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pon

1046

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:1046–1054