Organizational climate: Individual preferences and organizational realities revisited

Abstract

Found that the fit of new agents' (N = 914) life-insurance agency climate expectations and preferences to the realities of the climate of the agency they joined was correlated with new agents' success (tenure and sales) 1 year after hire. The correlations were essentially zero. Further analyses suggested, however, that higher probability of new-agent success was related for one cluster of agencies (a "positive" type of agency) to a better fit between expectations and realities, and in another cluster (a "negative" type of agency) to a poorer fit of preferences to realities. Although even these latter results are weak, it is suggested that previous findings indicating positive outcomes for new employees with realistic expectations may be an artifact resulting from basically "positive" organizations permitting researchers to tell new employees what it is "really" like in the organization. (26 ref) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)