Why and When Organizational Climate Affects Attitudes and Behavior of Employees in Work and Non-Work Settings

With this dissertation, I aim to shed light on how the workplace affects employees’ attitudes and behaviors in work and non-work settings. A perspective to investigate these workplace influences provides the construct of organizational climate. To develop a theoretical framework of why and when organizational climate affects employees’ attitudes and behaviors, I draw on theories of attitude and behavior change and integrate them with research on organizational climate. I propose that organizational climate affects employee behavior through the establishment of social norms in the workplace and that this indirect association is amplified by climate strength and organizational identification. Further, I suggest that organizational climate can spill over into the non-work domain through a self-perception process. Through this spillover process organizational climate can even relate to distal attitudes and behaviors that are relevant for the broader societal context. I utilize the case of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to test my theoretical model. The results suggest that social norms mediate associations of COVID-19 safety climate and COVID-19 safety behavior on both the employee-level and unit-level. Results were mixed regarding the moderating roles of climate strength and organizational identification. I found no support for an amplifying effect of climate strength and mixed support for an amplifying effect of organizational identification. Regarding spillover, the results imply that COVID-19 safety climate not only affects employees’ behavior in the workplace but further leads them to continue this behavior in the non-work domain. Further, COVID-19 safety climate also extended to more distal attitudes (vaccine readiness) and behaviors (vaccination).