Psychological climate: what is it and what does it look like?

Within the field of management and organisational behaviour research, the climate concept is relatively common. Despite its presence in the literature, however, at times it is poorly defined, particularly in terms of the distinction between psychological climate and organisational climate. Further, there is ongoing discussion in the literature regarding the content of the climate construct and whether it is best conceptualised as multidimensional or a single higher order factor. This paper seeks to address these major issues through discussing two questions associated with the psychological climate literature. The first question is what is psychological climate? The second research question is what does psychological climate look like? The first question is addressed through a review of the current literature in the field. The second question is addressed through the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses conducted on psychological climate data gathered from 739 employees of one organisation. The results of the data analysis indicate that the psychological climate construct is best represented as a multidimensional construct