Assessment Norms Development of the Subjective Work Environment Battery “B-SWE” for Chilean Organizations

Abstract

The objective of this research was to generate evaluation norms for the scores of the Subjective Work Environment Battery "B-SWE" from a base of 1,413 valid response protocols of workers belonging to 11 complex organizations in the central-south region of Chile. The B-SWE seeks to identify and analyze the subjective factors of work climate, understood as the result of the interrelation of the dimensions of organizational climate and culture, professional burnout, psychosomatic symptomatology, and coping strategies in specific socio-occupational contexts, which reflect the human dimension of the productive processes of an organization. Scales were obtained according to administrative dependency (public or private) and gender. The B-SWE comprises 136 Likert-type items with a five-option scaling, presenting adequate evidence of internal structure in the Chilean context. The results showed the existence of "differentiating dimensions" according to gender and dependency of the organizations, from which centile norms are constructed for the raw scores of the 15 dimensions of the B-SWE. Once the norms were obtained, differentiated and specific interpretations were presented for each dimension. In conclusion, the workers in public organizations showed higher levels of Organizational Trust, Job Satisfaction, Reflective Action, and Personal Fulfillment. In contrast, female workers presented higher levels of Affective Seeking, Spiritual Support, and Psychosomatic Symptoms and lower levels of Affective Hardening.