Organizational climate, relative psychological climate and job satisfaction

Purpose Organizational climate has been shown to predict job satisfaction and other employee attitudes. Using the concept of organizational climate, strength has shown mixed success. However, diversity in psychological climate at the individual level has not been explored. The paper aims to introduce a new individual‐level concept: relative psychological climate paper. Design/methodology/approach Using the example of supportive leadership climate, the significance of this concept for predicting job satisfaction is assessed. Data from a large national British survey (the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004) of 19,993 employees within 1,593 workplaces are used. Findings Workplace supportive leadership climate quality, climate strength and individual relative leadership climate position are shown to be significantly associated with job satisfaction. So is the interaction of climate quality and climate strength. When all three variables are assessed simultaneously, only the individual relative position and the climate quality are substantially related to job satisfaction. Originality/value Individual relative climate is introduced and the shows that this new concept is related to job satisfaction, thereby demonstrating its usefulness in climate research.