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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Organizational climate and climate strength in UK hospitals

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In recent years, researchers have paid increasing attention to the idea of “climate strength” – the level of agreement about climate within a work group or organization. However, at present the literature is unclear about the extent to which climate strength is a positive attribute, and is concerned predominantly with small teams or organizational units. This paper considers three theoretical perspectives of climate strength, and extends these to the organizational level. These three roles of climate strength are then tested in 56 hospitals in the United Kingdom. Positive relationships were discovered between two of three climate dimensions (Quality and Integration) and expert ratings of organizational performance, and curvilinear effects between Integration climate strength and performance was also found Very high or very low Integration climate strength was less beneficial than a moderate level of climate strength. However, there were no interaction effects discovered between climate and climate strength. Implications for future climate strength research are discussed.