Untying the Climate Strength Knot: A Meta-Analytic Examination of Restricted Variance Effects in Climate Strength Relations

Climate strength is often included in organizational climate models, however, its role in such models remains unclear. We propose that the inconsistent findings regarding the effects of climate strength are due in part to its complicated relationship with climate level. Specifically, we propose that the relationship between level and strength is heteroscedastic and nonlinear due to restricted variance (RV) and potential leniency bias in climate ratings. We examine how this relationship between level and strength affects relations between climate strength and work-related outcomes, as well as the implications that this has for bilinear interactions between level and strength. In this meta-analysis, we analyzed 81 independent samples from 77 articles and find support for a heteroscedastic, curvilinear relationship between climate level and climate strength, consistent with the notion that variance compression and leniency bias are present in climate ratings. With regard to the three proposed roles of climate strength in organizational models, we find some support for an additive effect of strength on outcomes, but only at high levels of climate level, and little support for strength as a bilinear moderator of level-outcome relations or for strength as a nonlinear predictor of outcomes. We do find, however, some support for nonlinear interaction effects between level and strength. We discuss implications of our findings for the role of climate strength in future research and for multilevel theory in general.