Organizational Climate Shapes Employee Behavior Through Social Norms

Abstract Organizational climate is widely acknowledged as a key construct for examining how organizations shape employee behavior. However, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of why and when organizational climate exerts its effects is still lacking. In our research, we conceptualize the organization as a social context and draw on theories of social influence to develop a theoretical framework of how organizational climate affects employee behavior. Specifically, we propose that the effects of organizational climate are driven by social norms and are amplified by organizational identification. We conducted three preregistered field studies (total N = 1,983) to test our theoretical model in the domains of safety behavior related to COVID-19 prevention and pro-environmental behavior. Across studies and levels of analysis (unit- and employee-level), we consistently found that the link between organizational climate and employee behavior was mediated by social norms. In exploratory analyses on the unit-level, we further found that this indirect effect is moderated (stage-2 moderation) by the average level of team identification, with stronger effects emerging in teams with stronger collective identification. Taken together, our findings suggest that organizational climate shapes employee behavior in part through social norms.