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Validation of the four-factor Team Climate Inventory in Greece Sofia C. Chatzi and Ioannis Nikolaou
Validation of the four-factor TCI in Greece 341
Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece Abstract Purpose – Innovation among team members has long been an area of interest to social scientists, and particularly to industrial/organizational psychologists. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factor structure of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI), a multidimensional team-level measure of team-working style, in Greece. Design/methodology/approach – The TCI was translated into Greek and administered to a total of 52 work teams (n ¼ 236 individuals) in clerical and shop floor working positions employed in a variety of jobs in the public and private sector. Findings – An item analysis indicated that all original TCI items, except one, should be retained in the Greek version of the TCI. Further analyses yielded high internal consistency both for the full scale and for the four dimensions, and also acceptable discriminant validity among the four scales. An exploratory factor analysis was also successful in extracting the four original factors, accounting for 55.67 percent of the total variance. Research limitations/implications – The results provided further support for the validity of the original version of the TCI. Practical implications – It is concluded that the Greek adaptation of the TCI is a potentially useful instrument to measure group climate dimensions that may facilitate work teams’ innovative capacity. Originality/value – The findings provided support for the adequacy of the TCI to measure team climate for innovation in Greece Keywords Innovation, Teamworking, Climate, Organizational culture, Greece Paper type Research paper
Introduction Innovation has been defined by West and Farr (1989, p. 16) as: . . . the intentional introduction and application within a role, group, or organization of ideas, processes, products or procedures, new to the relevant unit to adoption, designed to significantly benefit role performance, the group, the organization or the wider society.
Innovation has been studied at different levels of analysis. More specifically, research has shed light upon a number of factors at the individual, group, and, more widely, the organizational level of analysis (see Amabile, 1988; Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson and King, 1993; King, 1990; King and Anderson, 2002; Van de Ven et al., 1989; West, 1990, 2001, 2002). Research on creativity deals with identifying individual-level factors that promote suggestion-making. For example, traditionally the focus has been on variables such as job competence, intrinsic task motivation, and creative personality (Amabile and Gryskiewicz, 1989; Axtell et al., 2000; Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Unsworth and West, 1998). Job autonomy has also been shown to be one of the critical components of
International Journal of Organizational Analysis Vol. 15 No. 4, 2007 pp. 341-357 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1934-8835 DOI 10.1108/19348830710900142
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individual innovative behavior (Ramamoorthy et al., 2005). Considering wider organizational factors, most research has focused on the effects of the organization climate on the individual and group innovation. A climate supportive of innovation encourages effective innovation (Knapp, 1963; Pelz, 1956; Thistlethwaite, 1963; Torrance, 1965; West and Anderson, 1996). Concerning group innovation, research has explored variables such as heterogeneity of group composition, which has been found to be related to group innovation (Jackson, 1996; McGrath, 1984). Rogers (1954) suggested that cohesiveness among team members determines the degree to which individuals believe that they can suggest new ideas without being censured (see Scott and Bruce, 1994). Group innovation increases when members feel that new ideas are encouraged and expected, and when they feel safe enough to participate in decision making and voice their ideas (Anderson and West, 1998). On the other hand, research on team size provides greater evidence that teams with a sufficient number of members to perform the team task are effective (Guzzo, 1988; Guzzo and Shea, 1992; Hackman, 1990; West and Anderson, 1996). Actually, previous research has concluded that there is a curvilinear relationship between team size and innovation (Jackson, 1996; Poulton, 1995, cited in Anderson and West, 1996). Findings have also shown that team heterogeneity is strongly related to team innovation (Jackson, 1996; McGrath, 1984). Teams bring together people from different disciplines and functions who have pertinent expertise about the proposed innovation problem (Galbraith, 1977; Kanter, 1988; Lovelace et al., 2001). However, contradictory findings report increased levels of conflict in teams with diverse members. Diversity appears to increase conflict, reduce cohesion, complicate internal communications, and hamper coordination within the team (Ancona and Caldwell, 1992; Dougherty, 1987; Kiesler, 1978; Shaw, 1971; Pfeffer and O’Reilly, 1987). Climate: definitional issues – how did the workgroup climate for innovation arise? There has been considerable attention among organizational and social psychologists given to the concept of climate (Campbell et al., 1970; Schneider and Reichers, 1983; Rousseau, 1988; Schneider, 1990), but differences in opinions exist about how to define and measure climate at different levels of analysis. For example, James and Sells (1981, p. 276) define climate as: individuals’ cognitive representations of proximal environments . . . expressed in terms of psychological meaning and significance to the individual.
According to the same authors, climate is the “‘ambience’ of an organization . . . various patterns of influence on employee (member) behavior, generated by prevailing environmental conditions in an organization” (Sells and James, 1987). Others have put the emphasis on the significance of shared perceptions of organizational policies, practices and procedures. Shared meaning evolves from the communicative interactions between individuals in the workplace. Since members of the same work group interact with each other more than with members of other groups, Schneider and Reichers (1983) argued that different work groups will generate different meanings regarding events, practices, and procedures that may be constant throughout the organization. It was those shared perceptions that compelled Anderson and West
(1998) to develop a measure of proximal work group climate. More specifically, they defined the proximal work group as “either the permanent or semi-permanent team to which individuals are assigned, whom then identify with regularly in order to perform work-related tasks” (Anderson and West, 1998, p. 236). In the late 1990s, an extensive literature review on team climate for innovation was carried out by West and Anderson, examining factors such as organizational climate, team effectiveness, and innovation at work (see West, 1990; West and Anderson, 1996). From this research, four team climate factors were extracted as being critical in determining effective team performance and levels of innovative behavior in teams. These factors are: “vision”, “participative safety”, “task orientation”, and “support for innovation” (West, 1990; West and Anderson, 1996). According to this model, for a team to be innovative, it must have a clearly defined strategy and shared objectives about the purpose of the team within the organization. Participation in decision making on the other hand, tends to foster greater effectiveness and commitment (Bowers and Seashore, 1966; Coch and French, 1948; Lawler and Hackman, 1969; West and Anderson, 1996), since the expertise of all team members is likely to be brought to bear in the process of decision making. Openness among team members in the exchange of information and ideas facilitate team functioning and task execution and, hence, effectiveness (Wright and Cordery, 2003), including every byproduct of team effectiveness such as team innovation. These processes can be the result of a shared concern with the quality of team task, or what has been called task orientation (West, 1990; West and Anderson, 1996). Within teams this is evidenced by emphasis on audit systems for evaluating and modifying performance, critical approaches to quality of performance, intra-team advice, feedback and cooperation, mutual monitoring, clear outcome criteria, exploration and emergence of opposing opinions, and a concern to provide a high quality product, process, and service. Finally, teams that are willing to take risks and experiment with every innovation produced by team members will result in increased innovation, which means that innovation is more likely to occur in contexts where innovative attempts are applauded regardless of the possibility of failure (Amabile, 1983; Kanter, 1983; West and Anderson, 1996). Support for innovation is important for team functioning too. This is the expectation, approval and practical support for attempts to introduce new and improved ways of doing things in the work environment. Within teams, new ideas may be characteristically rejected or ignored, or they find both verbal and practical support. Based on the four-factor model of work group innovation of West (1990; Anderson and West, 1998), Anderson and West (1994) developed a multidimensional team-level measure of team-working style serving as a team development tool to facilitate interventions in work groups related to innovation. The original 116-item Team Climate Inventory (TCI) was subjected to exploratory and confirming factor analyses to different samples to ensure that it was measuring the factors that it was supposed to measure (Anderson and West, 1996, 1998). These analyses led to the published 44-item short-form version (Anderson and West, 1994), which includes items that refer to different though essential aspects of team climate for innovation. Subsequently, the TCI was translated into several languages and was psychometrically tested in different samples throughout Europe, including Swedish (Agrell and Gustafson, 1994), Finish (Kivima¨ki et al., 1997), Italian (Ragazzoni et al., 2002), and Norwegian (Mathisen et al., 2004; Mathisen et al., 2006), among others.
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The short form of TCI has four super ordinate scales divided into 13 sub-scales. In accordance with the West (1990) model, the four scales refer to: (1) Vision. How clearly defined, shared and valued are the team’s objectives. This scale is divided into the following sub-scales: clarity, perceived value, attainability, and sharedness (11 items). (2) Participative safety. Whether team members share the information during the decision-making process, how often they interact with each other, and to what extent they feel safe to propose and implement new ways of doing things or new and improved products. This category includes four sub-categories such as: information sharing, safety, influence, and interaction frequency (12 items). (3) Task orientation. To what extent the team has as the main objective to provide excellence in quality and task performance in relation to the shared mission. This scale consists of sub-scales for excellence, appraisal, and ideation (seven items). (4) Support for innovation. Whether team members perceive supportiveness as a critical factor to take an innovative approach. Team members take action when they believe that other team members and the supervisor are supportive of every new idea that might challenge established systems. This dimension consists of the two sub-scales of articulated support and enacted support (eight items). In addition, six items are included that measure social desirability in responses designed to alert those that fill in the inventory to potentially fake responses. Since its initial development, TCI has been psychometrically tested on different samples including primary healthcare teams, community psychometric care teams, social service teams, management teams, production and clerical teams in the public and private sectors (Anderson and West, 1998; Agrell and Gustafson, 1994; Kivima¨ki et al., 1997). Results from internal homogeneity tests reveal significant levels of internal consistency for four dimensions of the TCI with alphas ranging between 0.84 and 0.94 for the UK version (Anderson and West, 1998), 0.86 and 0.91 for the Swedish version (Agrell and Gustafson, 1994), 0.82 and 0.90 for the Italian version (Ragazzoni et al., 2002), 0.83 and 0.94 for the Finnish version (Kivima¨ki et al., 1997), and 0.83 and 0.94 for the Norwegian version (Mathisen et al., 2004). Concerning construct validity of the TCI, studies have produced mixed results. Exploratory factor analyses revealed a five-factor solution in the UK, Italian and Norwegian samples (Anderson and West, 1998; Ragazzoni et al., 2002; Mathisen et al., 2004). In this factor solution, items referring to the frequency that team members interact were distinguished from the participative safety scale and loaded in the fifth factor, named “Interaction Frequency.” A four-factor solution was revealed in the Swedish and Finish samples (Agrell and Gustafson, 1994; Kivima¨ki et al., 1997), although the latter gave mixed results. Factor analyses were run on two samples, where a five-factor solution was appropriate in one sample and both four and five factor solutions were acceptable in the other (Kivima¨ki et al., 1997). The aim of the present study is to discuss the Greek version of the TCI and its validation, and as a consequence to accentuate any differences between the European
samples (in terms of inter-correlations between the scales in different samples). We also tried to provide information about any potential correlations between the demographic variables and the four dimensions of team climate for innovation. Method procedure A large number of work teams from the Greek public and private sector agreed to participate in this research. Participants completed the survey during working hours. There were 236 employees who participated in the study, with a total of 52 work teams. The 58.1 percent of the total sample were males and the remaining females. Their age ranged between 20 and 64 years and the mean age was 38.40 years. Team size ranged between two and 25 persons with a median size of four members (SD ¼ 5:02). From the 236 participants in the study, 30 (12.7 percent) team members were elementary (primary) school graduates, 91 (38.6 percent) persons had finished high school, 87 (36.9 percent) were university graduates, and 5.9 percent of the participants had completed a postgraduate degree. Team members were told that the purpose of the study was to gain understanding of the way organizational teams function and work together. Teams were promised and were given feedback following completion of the survey. Team members were asked to fill it out the survey on their own time, independently, and without consulting their peers. In order to reach acceptable response rates, the first author was present during the survey administration in order to assist in cases when participants had problems with the procedure, rather than waiting until all participants returned the materials sometime in the near future. As a result, a very high response rate was achieved (95 percent). Measures The TCI Two experienced Greek organizational psychologists translated the original 44-item version of the TCI into Greek. A bilingual individual then translated the Greek version back into English, and the two versions were compared by the authors for potential differences in meaning and structure. Participants filled in the questionnaire individually and were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed with each item on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 ¼ strongly disagree to 5 ¼ strongly agree. Results Item analysis The item analysis was carried out by correlating each relevant item with the respective scale (excluding the item itself). This process worked well for all but one item (“we all influence each other”), which did not conform to other items in the scale: Cronbach’s alpha coefficient increased sufficiently when the item was deleted. The item changed the corrected correlation between the item and the scale in connection with the remaining items (r ¼ 0:26), while the scale variance changed when the item was deleted. The correlations between the item and the other items of the scale were very low, and it did not contribute to the total aggregation of the scale (“participative safety”). However, Cronbach’s alpha for participative safety was r ¼ 0:88. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated separately and for the remaining scales. In particular, Cronbach’s alpha for Vision was r ¼ 0:87, for Support for Innovation scale r ¼ 0:87, and for Task Orientation scale r ¼ 0:87. In the three last scales Cronbach’s alphas decreased if any
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item was deleted and the subsequent correlations between the remaining items in the three scales are about the same, while the scales’ mean, the corrected item-total scale correlations, and the scales’ variance if the item deleted is not changed considerably. Exploratory factor analysis To confirm the factor structure provided by the original version of the TCI (Anderson and West, 1994), an exploratory factor analysis was performed on the original 38 items. Our purpose was to clarify whether the four- or the five-factor structure explained our data. Pre-analysis tests for the suitability of the sample for factor-analysis were computed as recommended by Comrey (1978). A principal component analysis indicated that the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy for factor analysis was 0.91. Our sample seemed to be adequate for the method we used, and the index was above the limit of 0.70. If below this number, factor analysis may not have been a good approach. The Bartlett test of sphericity was significant at p , 0:001, indicating the suitability of this data for factor analytic procedures. The ratio of cases was 236:38, or, approximately, 6:1. This ratio is acceptable according to some factor analysts (e.g. Gorsuch, 1983; Nunnally, 1978), although others have argued that smaller ratios are also acceptable (Comrey, 1978; Ferguson, 1981; Kline, 1986). A principle components analysis using Kaiser’s criterion (that suggests only factors with eigenvalues higher than 1.0 be retained) indicated that seven factors should be retained. In order to estimate how many factors have meaning to our data, we applied the Cattell Scree Test (Cattell, 1966), which represents a delineation of the eigenvalues (or the percentage of the explained variance of values). Cattell’s Scree Test, which was applied to the initial EFA without iteration, revealed a five- or four-factor solution (Figure 1). The solution of five factors accounted for 55.67 percent of the total variance, while the solution of four factors accounted for 52.28 percent. Thus, randomization that included the systematic factors of individual differences and the error of random sampling, was in one case 44.33 percent and in the other 47.72 percent. To achieve the best solution, we limited the number of factors in one case to five and in the other to four with iteration and Varimax (orthogonal rotation). The solution of five factors gave mixed results. According to prior findings (Anderson and West, 1998), the fifth factor comprises four items relating to the frequency of interaction both formally and informally between team members (e.g. “We keep in touch with each other as a team”; “We keep in regular contact with each other”; “Members of the team meet frequently to talk both formally and informally,” etc.). In our case, these items loaded onto the second factor (the factor of Participative safety). It was not possible to extract the fifth factor related to frequency of interaction. Hence, we decided to retain four factors. Table I presents the factor solution and the factor loadings after Varimax rotation. Most items loaded on their theoretical scale. Items 27 to 37 loaded onto two different factors, the fourth and fifth. Except for the item 3, the remaining items are related to the scale of Vision of the original version of the TCI. A more comprehensive review of Table I convinced us that we had the four-factor solution. Item 33 (“How worthwhile do you think these objectives are to you?”), item 34 (“How worthwhile do you think these objectives are to the organization?”), and item 35 (“How worthwhile do you think these objectives are to the wider society?”) were responsible for the dichotomy problems associated with the factor of Vision. Probably, acquiescence effects created the
Validation of the four-factor TCI in Greece 347
Figure 1. Scree plot of initial analysis
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Table I. Varimax rotated factor loadings of the Greek version of the Team Climate Inventory
Support for innovation i11 i21 i25 i17 i24 i2 i23 i6 i10 i8 i7 i16 i20 i14 i5 i13 i19 i1 i26 i40 i43 i41 i38 i39 i42 i44 i30 i31 i37 i36 i27 i3 i34 i35 i28 i32 i29 i33 Percentage of variance
0.690 0.672 0.660 0.655 0.600 0.526 0.495 0.442 0.440 0.386 0.489
0.449 0.418
Participative safety
Factors Task orientation
Vision1
0.466
0.352
0.730 0.655 0.611 0.575 0.569 0.551 0.536 0.460 0.422 0.383
0.425 0.510 0.370 0.387
0.739 0.682 0.669 0.614 0.582 0.543 0.399
0.384 0.702 0.650 0.627 0.542 0.519 0.417 0.375 0.351 0.534
0.418 36.156
Vision2
6.721
4.980
4.425
0.364 0.767 0.720 0.630 0.604 0.552 0.483 3.394
Notes: For best understanding of this table we have omitted all correlations beyond j0.35j; Extraction method: Principal Component Analysis; Rotation method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization; Rotation converged in 12 iterations
problem. As a result, we combined the fourth and fifth factor into one factor (the Factor of Vision). The solution of a four factor structure with the factor of “Vision� divided into two sub factors accounted for 55.67 percent of the total variance. Factor 1, which accounted
for 36.15 percent of the variance, included items exclusively related to the theoretical “Support for innovation” scale. Factor 2 accounted for 6.72 percent of the total variance and included items from the theoretical “Participative safety” scale. Four items that leaned towards a fifth factor of the original version of TCI (Anderson and West, 1998) related to the frequency of interaction of team members, were included in the “Participative safety” scale. Factor 3 accounted for 4.98 percent of the variance and included items exclusively from the theoretical “Task orientation” scale. Factor 4 displayed unambiguous patterns of item loadings. It accounted for one case, or 4.42 percent of the total variance, and in the remaining 3.39 percent of the variance included items from the theoretical “Vision” scale. In our sample, the order of factor appearance is different from that of the original analysis introduced by Anderson and West (1998). In the original analysis, the factors were retrieved in the order of vision, participative safety, support for innovation, and interaction frequency. More detailed analyses of this solution were undertaken in order to examine the internal consistency of the factors and factor independence. Table II presents intercorrelations, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, means, and standard deviations for the four factors as composite scales on this sample. Alpha coefficients ranged between 0.87 and 0.89, indicating acceptable levels of internal homogeneity and reliability for all four factors. Scale correlations ranged between 0.57 (Vision with Participative safety) and 0.78 (Participative safety with Support for innovation). All scales were significantly and positively intercorrelated (p , 0:01). Moreover, these correlations were not too high to suggest concerns over multicollinearity. Table III shows the Pearson’s production moment correlation matrix for the scales calculated on the basis of the English, Italian, Finnish, and Norwegian factor analyses, and the data from the Greek factor analysis, which indicate similar and adequate levels of intra-scale correlation. Discussion The results of the present study were largely congruent with the results of the original study using British samples (Anderson and West, 1994; Agrell and Gustafson, 1994). The item analysis showed that all items should be retained, except for item 3 of the total scale. The stability of the Greek version of the instrument was very high. This was indicated by the internal consistency of the four dimensions of the TCI factor analysis that showed that the four-factor solution was appropriate for the Greek sample (explained variance 55.67 percent). The TCI also appears to be a reliable and valid measure for assessing team climate for innovation in the Greek context. However, the order of extraction of the factors differs from the English version. Support for innovation was the first scale extracted. It almost has the same composition as the English scale with the addition of one item (“There are real attempts to share information throughout the team”). We decided to include this in the Participative safety scale because it also demonstrated very high cross-loadings with this factor. Even though clear objectives are an important issue to manufacturing and service organizations in Greece, the support of innovative behaviors seems to be a more critical factor since Greece is among countries seeking new, radical investments in sectors that have fallen behind (e.g. Information Technology). Thus, the teams in the Greek sample appear to have the desire and willingness to initiate new ideas of doing work, and this effort is supported by other members and teams’ supervisors. However,
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Table II. Descriptive statistics and intercorrelation matrix for the four-factor solution in the Greek sample
Note: * p , 0:01
236 236 236 236 236
41.14 39.98 29.60 25.58 136.32
Mean 7.01 7.89 5.50 5.98 22.81
SD 0.87 0.89 0.87 0.88
a 1.00 0.57 * 0.63 * 0.61 * 0.82 *
Vision 1.00 0.78 * 0.68 * 0.89 *
Participative safety
1.00 0.70 * 0.89 *
Support for innovation
1.00 0.85 *
Task orientation
350
Vision Participative safety Support for innovation Task orientation Total TCI
n
1.00
Total TCI
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Participative Safety
Task orientation
Vision
1.00 0.76 * 0.72 * 0.62 * 0.73 *
1.00 0.63 * 0.60 * 0.77 *
1.00 0.65 * 0.61 *
1.00 0.56 *
1.00
TCI: validation of the original version Support for innovation 1.00 Participative safety 0.60 * Task orientation 0.62 * Vision 0.60 * Interaction frequency 0.44 *
1.00 0.60 * 0.46 * 0.49 *
1.00 0.59 * 0.49 *
1.00 0.35 *
1.00
TCI: Italian version Support for innovation Participative safety Task orientation Vision Interaction frequency
1.00 0.78 * 0.73 * 0.64 * 0.58 *
1.00 0.62 * 0.60 * 0.64 *
1.00 0.65 * 0.47 *
1.00 0.45 *
1.00
TCI: Finnish version Support for innovation Participative safety Task orientation Vision Interaction frequency
1.00 0.71 * 0.67 * 0.54 * 0.56 *
1.00 0.60 * 0.54 * 0.85 *
1.00 0.65 * 0.51 *
1.00 0.44 *
1.00
TCI: Norwegian version (aggregated response data) Support for innovation 1.00 Participative safety 0.86 * 1.00 Task orientation 0.78 * 0.80 * Vision 0.59 * 0.62 *
1.00 0.67 *
1.00
TCI: Greek version Support for innovation Participative safety Task orientation Vision
1.00 0.70 *
1.00
Scales TCI: original version Support for innovation Participative safety Task orientation Vision Interaction frequency
1.00 0.57 * 0.63 * 0.61 *
1.00 0.78 * 0.68 *
Interaction frequency
Validation of the four-factor TCI in Greece 351
Note: * p , 0:01
the issue of concern is whether more radical, but risky decisions of teams are taken into consideration by the upper levels of organizations in Greece. Participative safety and interaction frequency were not extracted separately and instead constituted a unique factor. In the English version, interaction frequency, which refers to the frequency that team members interact through participation in decision making involved in the change process, is a subscale of participative safety. This indicates partial overlapping of their contents. The concept of participative safety is related both to the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of interactions among team members. Generally, our findings suggest that the Greek teams introduced new
Table III. Intercorrelation matrix for TCI scales and for the six different samples
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ideas when there was trust among team members. Trust has a positive effect on the quality of task processes by enhancing the perceived value of team members’ interactions, their personal commitment and participation in decision making (Friedlander et al., 1985). Greek team members are possibly engaged in activities that increase team performance and team innovation when organizational climates support actions that improve established methods, processes, and practices. Our data reproduced the task orientation scale in a similar fashion to the original version, indicating the robustness of the specific scale in different samples. Team members are sufficiently focused on each others’ roles, skills, and the tasks required to meet their needs. At the same time, there appears to be an appropriate level of awareness within the team of each member’s role and responsibility, leading to the teams’ ability to cope constructively with professional conflicts (Williams and Laungani, 1999). Vision did not load as a single scale, as might have been expected. Instead, Vision was divided into two subscales. Speculating about this unexpected division, we could say that in Greek organizations work teams do not set objectives internally, but on the contrary these are imposed by the top management of the organization. Work teams, especially in the public sector, are defined by a common purpose (Hayes, 1997), and team members’ task interdependence. Since job tasks rarely change, team vision is likely never being achieved, but only occasionally in cases when new processes and systems are introduced as a result of changes in the global market. An important finding in this study is that the translation of the original version of the TCI into Greek did not dramatically alter the factor structure of the instrument, meaning that the items showed cross-cultural similarities. However, the overall scores of the TCI scales were lower in the Greek sample compared to the British sample. Greek employees revealed less sharedness among team members in terms of teams’ objectives. They also were found to participate less frequently in decision-making processes regarding new initiatives compared to their British counterparts. They are less task-oriented and believe that their teams hinder movements towards new ways of doing things in their work, thus being less supportive of innovative behaviors and actions. It is likely that these results are due to the prevailing work culture of Greek organizations, and that the UK sample was taken from health service organizations while the Greek sample covered a greater variety of different types of organizational branches and different types of organizations. The internal consistency of the TCI was adequate, as suggested by the Cronbach alpha values being above the threshold of acceptability for the scales calculated according to the English version, and they were not so high as to indicate overlap between items as in the case of the Norwegian version of the TCI (Mathisen et al., 2004). The authors of the Norwegian version recommended that a short version of the TCI would be acceptable (Mathisen et al., 2004). The study’s results indicate that it was not possible to confirm the five-factor solution. Our data suggest that the four-factor solution is preferred, though another factor analysis is needed to confirm the findings of the exploratory factor analysis. However, the present results show that there is no indication that frequency of participation, a quantitative aspect of participation, can be distinguished from other more qualitative aspects of participation. This finding is not in accordance with prior studies of the TCI (Anderson and West, 1998; Kivima¨ki et al., 1997; Ragazzoni et al.,
2002). Respective studies in the UK, Finland, Norway, and Italy suggested a fifth scale be added to the TCI. Our study revealed the same factor structure as in the Swedish sample, probably indicating cultural similarities that require further exploration in terms of work climate between the two countries. The main purpose of this study was practical in nature. Teamwork in both the public and private sectors is gaining credibility as a means of improving productivity. Team climate is an essential aspect to ensure smooth team functioning. However, up to now, no instruments to measure team climate have been available in Greece. TCI is a useful instrument that can be used in organizational climate surveys, team building and development, selection of new members for teams, and group development. However, further research is needed to investigate potential measures of the TCI in different contexts. Probably more research must be conducted on a team level using aggregated scores. This perhaps is considered a more appropriate validation of the instrument, since the theoretical basis of the TCI is a model of team climate for innovation and TCI is a team-level instrument (Mathisen et al., 2004). Our study gave some insights on how this scale functions in Greek organizational settings, following instructions set by previous studies.
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Ioannis Nikolaou (PhD, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) is Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece. Previously, he was Head of the Training Department at Egnatia Bank in Athens, and he has also taught at Greek Open University, Panteion University, and the University of New Haven. He has published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, Personality & Individual Differences, Stress and Health, International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Personnel Review, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of Change Management, Employee Relations, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, and other journals. Ioannis Nikolaou is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: inikol@xueb.gr
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