Validity and reliability study for social climate scale in organizations

Abstract

Purpose- The importance of the social environment in which employees are involved and the inter-personal relationships in organizations have been discussed since the neoclassical period. There are various studies related to this issue in the literature. The purpose of this study is to develop a social climate scale in order to evaluate the social environment in which the organization's employees are involved. Method- The study was conducted on the clinical and administrative employees of five public hospitals operating in Istanbul. The research sample consists of 517 observations. In order to enable a proper assessment of the social climate, employees working less than six months with the organization were not included in the study. IBM SPSS 24.0 and IBM SPSS AMOS 24.0 package programs were used to analyse the obtained data. Factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis in the structural equation model, binary correlations, t-tests and variance analysis (ANOVA) as well as descriptive statistics were applied. Findings- During the development process of the social climate scale, a scale of 49 items was drawn based on the theories and studies in the literature. The final scale obtained from factor analysis consists of 26 items and 6 dimensions. These dimensions are as follows: interpersonal coherence (7 items), organizational support (7 items), intragroup communication (4 items), work ethic (4 items), occupational cooperation (2 items) and out of workplace relationships (2 items). The total reliability of the scale was 0.87 and the reliability coefficients of individual dimensions were 0.84, 0.83, 0.78, 0.71, 0.89 and 0.80, respectively. Conclusion- The literature is certainly not poor in terms of studies assessing the organizational climate on the basis of a number of dimensions such as ethical climate, safety climate, and psychological climate. Yet, the number of studies on social climate is rather limited, with those investigating the topic focusing mostly on education. It is believed that, in this sense, the social climate scale developed in this study will make a unique contribution to the literature.