Climate, School

School climate can be defined as the conditions and shared perceptions of organizational variables thought to affect organizational functioning, such as teacher morale and principal leadership style. There have been two major strands of school climate research, beginning with the traditional strand focusing on organizational climate. The second came later and concentrated on school social climate.

Historical development of the first strand began in schools with observations by school administrators. They found that schools differed in terms of esprit de corps. H. Jerome Freiberg noted The Management of a City School, the 1908 book written by Arthur C. Perry, a school principal in Brooklyn, New York; esprit de corps, school climate, or school pride is not easily or quickly gained, but a tradition to be passed along through generations. Further development of this area of study progressed beyond observations gleaned from direct experience with schools to characterizing and measuring multiple dimensions of organizational climate through surveys.

A dominant idea in climate research is that climate is a gestalt, meaning that individual elements are formed into wholes that represent more than their individual components. Thus, organizational climate reflects perceived patterns in the experiences of organizational members. In education, the pioneering work of Andrew W. Halpin and Don B. Croft sought to identify multiple dimensions of faculty group and leader characteristics that would generate the gestalt that was climate. In the 1960s, they developed the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), which included four subscales for the faculty [Page 154]group: disengagement (lack of task involvement), hindrance (burdensome administrative duties), esprit (morale and sense of accomplishment), and intimacy (friendly social relations). Also included were four subscales for the principal as a leader: aloofness (principal acts formal and impersonal), production emphasis (supervises teachers closely), thrust (sets an example by working hard), and consideration (enhances teachers'welfare). Profiles based on these subtests generated six descriptive labels of climate, termed climate clusters or constellations. These constellations could be roughly arrayed on a continuum, with open and closed occupying the extreme ends and autonomous, controlled, familiar, and paternal the middle. An open climate, for example, featured high faculty esprit, low disengagement, and high principal consideration.

In the 1980s, researchers such as Laurence Iannaccone studying political phenomena in schools led to the notion that leaders' political aspirations needed to be included as part of climate. During this decade, Wayne Hoy and his colleagues undertook a substantial revision of Halpin and Croft's OCDQ. In 1986, Wayne Hoy and Sharon Clover developed and tested a revised instrument, which reformulated hindrance as a principal characteristic, terming it restrictive behavior. In addition, production emphasis was labeled directive behavior. These behaviors—imposing administrative requirements and exercising direct control over teachers' work—appeared to capture political dimensions of the principal's role. The previous aloofness subscale was omitted and the consideration subscale termed supportive behavior.

For teachers, a collegial subscale extended the concept of esprit from taking pleasure in working together and enjoying each other's company to having respect for each other's professional competence. This concept appeared to enhance teachers' professional role, perhaps linked to growing teacher unionism. Two earlier dimensions, intimacy and disengagement, remained. An open-closed continuum was proposed, with fewer climate constellations than Halpin and Croft (open, engaged, disengaged and closed). A revised instrument at the high school level also defined characteristics of principal and teacher behavior and an open-closed continuum. In the 1990s, Hoy and colleagues' work expanded to using an organizational health metaphor to study school climate. This work reflected developments in organizational theory at the time, which emphasized the organization's relationship with its environment. In an unhealthy climate, schools were vulnerable to debilitating outside forces and marked by ineffective leadership and low teacher morale.

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