Collective climates: A test of their sociopsychological significance

This article contributes to debate on the measurement of organizational climate. Use of means cloaks wide variations in individual perceptions. Use of clustering techniques to identify groups of people who see climate in a similar way has been questioned because such ''collectives'' may not represent meaningful sociopsychological groups. The present work is based on the view that meaningful collectives are most likely to emerge when people work together on common tasks in relatively isolated and defined physical locations. In an organization in which such conditions exist, a clustering technique largely failed to identify meaningful social collectives.