معیارهای اندازه گیری در سطوح متراکم تجزیه و تحلیل: کاربرد هایی برای تحقیق فرهنگ سازمان و پروژه GLOBE

We propose that scholars who are interested in group, organizational, or societal constructs should consider three approaches to designing aggregate measures. The typical approach to aggregate measure design in organization studies is to create measures based on individual-level metric structures, then evaluate whether the individual level measures can be aggregated. We propose that the field continue to use this approach for fundamentally individual-level constructs, but to also make greater use of two alternative approaches that are now only occasionally used. One approach used in cross-cultural research is to aggregate items to the target level, then evaluate measurement structure based on the relationships among items at the target level. Another approach is to aggregate individual-level scales to the target level, then evaluate measure characteristics based on the relationships among scales at the target level. We also recommend that constructing measures based on relationships among items or among scales at aggregate levels offers an approach to studying organizational culture that is distinct from organizational climate. We apply the distinctions between different approaches to aggregate measure design to a recent Leadership Quarterly article and to the GLOBE project on which that article is based.

The issues of level of analysis that typically arise in the organizational literature differ from those that typically arise in the cross-cultural literature. The organizational culture and climate literatures and the literature about aggregating survey data to the group level have long reflected scholars' awareness that relationships between predictors and criteria that are found at the individual level may or may not be found at an aggregate level ( Castro, 2002, Denison, 1996 and Glick, 1985). For example, scholars have come to recognize that if a measure of leadership and a measure of performance are correlated at the individual level, they may or may not be correlated when the measures are aggregated to the group or organizational levels. The cross-cultural literature, in contrast to the organizational literature, has attended more to the issue that the structure of the measures themselves typically differs depending on whether the measures are constructed based on the correlations among individual-level items or based on the correlations among the items after they have been aggregated to the societal-level ( Leung & Bond, 1989). In both literatures, the concern is that relationships found at one level of analysis do not necessarily apply at another. The difference is that the organizational literature tends to apply this insight to relationships among measures that were originally designed at the individual level, whereas the cross-cultural literature tends to apply it to relationships among the items that are used to construct the measures. Although both applications are appropriate, the problem of how level of analysis affects measure design is logically prior to the problem of how it affects relationships among measures and neglect of this problem has been a major limitation in the organizational literature about level of analysis. It is the measure design problem that we will address here. The article by Dickson and colleagues in this issue of Leadership Quarterly that is based on a major recent multilevel project, the GLOBE Project, as well as a recent book that reports on GLOBE ( House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) begin to address this problem, but both include ambiguities and inconsistencies. The present paper is intended to encourage and help scholars to deal with the issue that just as relationships between predictors and criteria may differ by level of analysis, so may the relationships among items that are used to construct predictors and criteria. We do so by integrating insights from the organizational and cross-cultural literatures to make recommendations about how to effectively handle level of analysis issues in measure design and use the GLOBE project as an example. First, we briefly summarize the perspective GLOBE has taken to creating scales beginning from data collected at the individual level for use at the organization and nation levels. We then review the way aggregation issues have been handled in the organizational culture and societal culture literatures. Next, we draw from a recent article in Leadership Quarterly and the GLOBE book, particularly chapter 8 ( Hanges & Dickson, 2004) to summarize how the GLOBE group has drawn from these literatures to design aggregate measures. We note ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies in the description of GLOBE's measure development process. In order to both further clarify how the level of analysis issues addressed in the organizational and cross cultural literatures can be best integrated, we specify three approaches to constructing aggregate measures. We conclude by applying these three approaches to organizational research, cross-cultural research, and the GLOBE project.

The present paper is intended to draw the attention of organizational behavior scholars and cross-cultural scholars to aggregation issues in each area that have relevance for the other. GLOBE is a particularly good example of the need to deal with both sets of issues. Organizational scholars working on projects with data from many organizations need to recognize that the level of analysis issues they have encountered when studying relationships between measures also apply to measure design. Organization culture scholars should consider the possibility that uniquely organization-level measures of organization culture might be developed that are different from averages of measures designed for individuals based on individual-level psychometrics. Scholars working on projects with data from many nations should attend more carefully to issues that organizational behavior scholars have addressed in aggregating individual level data before it is analyzed at the aggregate level. Doing so should help identify items that do not have the properties that are likely to let them contribute to measures created at the aggregate level. Given the modest number of aggregate data points (nations) in even the largest studies, eliminating items that should not be aggregated due to excessive individual-level variability may make it easier to successfully construct aggregate measures following the CAS approach. In order to accomplish these purposes, we suggest three approaches to creating aggregate measures and make recommendations about how different sorts of organizational research that aggregates data collected from individuals should progress. A caveat that applies to all research about aggregation is that some units may be culturally heterogeneous. Whether within-society variability makes it unreasonable to talk about national (or organizational) culture needs to be carefully considered if measures are designed based on society-level metric structures. It may well be that one organization, nation or society is too heterogeneous to include in a particular multiple nation analysis. Does that mean that organization-, nation- or society-level measures should not be constructed? No. That would be equivalent to the case where a particular individual shows too much complexity or instability for a measure of personality to apply. Neither the occasional heterogeneous society nor the complex or unstable individual invalidates a measure that is based on overall metrics at a particular level of analysis. Further, if the usual checks (ICCs, rwg, etc.) are conducted, they directly respond to the issue of possibly excessive within-unit heterogeneity that is frequently raised, but rarely directly addressed, in international comparative research. When evaluating whether aggregation is appropriate in cross cultural research, both the opportunity to collect large samples in each nation and the limitation that there will be considerable variability within a nation must be recognized. It is the large sample sizes and considerable variance between nations that is often found which make it possible to overcome the limitation of within-nation variability. The design of the GLOBE project on which the article and book that stimulated our analysis are based has unusual potential strengths that these publications have not yet exploited. In order to construct measures based on item interrelationships at the organization or nation level, a project needs to have data from many nations or organizations. Since organizational behavior scholars rarely have this sort of database, they are usually only able to consider a very limited aspect of data structures at these levels. Until other similar data bases are developed in which aggregation to both the organization and nation levels is possible, the field will await further leadership from the GLOBE scholars.