ABSTRACT
In recent years, the topic of organizational climate has been receiving increasing attention from researchers and practitioners alike. Litwin and Stringer (1968) define organizational climate as “a set of measurable properties of the work environment, based on the collective perceptions of the people who live and work in the environment and demonstrated to influence their behavior” (as Hoy and Miskel cited in 1996, p. 140).1 Stated a slightly different way, organizational climate is concerned with aspects of the organization that shape members’ behavior and attitudes concerning their work activities and the organizations in which they participate (O’Driscoll and Evans, 1988). Organizational climate research has generally addressed the identification of distinct properties of the work environment that comprise the global construct of organizational climate. With some important exceptions (Hoy, 1990), many studies of organizational climate have been conducted within business firms; analyses of organizational factors salient to climate in other organizational settings have received less attention (O’Driscoll and Evans, 1988). Such an organizational setting is schools.
