Assessing organizational climate: psychometric properties of the CLIOR Scale.

BACKGROUND Organizational climate is the set of perceptions shared by workers who occupy the same workplace. The main goal of this study is to develop a new organizational climate scale and to determine its psychometric properties. METHOD The sample consisted of 3,163 Health Service workers. A total of 88.7% of participants worked in hospitals, and 11.3% in primary care; 80% were women and 20% men, with a mean age of 51.9 years (SD= 6.28). RESULTS The proposed scale consists of 50 Likert-type items, with an alpha coefficient of 0.97, and an essentially one-dimensional structure. The discrimination indexes of the items are greater than 0.40, and the items show no differential item functioning in relation to participants' sex. A short version of the scale was developed, made up of 15 items, with discrimination indexes higher than 0.40, an alpha coefficient of 0.94, and its structure was clearly one-dimensional. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that the new scale has adequate psychometric properties, allowing a reliable and valid assessment of organizational climate.