Faculty Change Orientation Scale (FCOS)

Abstract

The Faculty Change Orientation Scale (FCOS) is an established psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the multi-dimensional readiness, orientation, and responsiveness of elementary and secondary school environments toward educational innovation and organizational reform. Developed by W. Sean Kearney and Paige A. Smith (2008) under the institutional school improvement framework championed by Wayne K. Hoy, the FCOS operationalizes school-level capacity for change as a tri-partite construct encompassing three essential stakeholder dimensions: Faculty Openness to Change, Principal Openness to Change, and Community Press for Change. Comprising 19 items evaluated on a 6-point Likert response continuum ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 6 (Strongly Agree), the instrument provides educational researchers, organizational psychologists, and school administrators with a psychometrically rigorous diagnosis of school climate dynamics. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate exceptional internal consistency across all three subscales, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .95 for Faculty Openness to Change, .87 for Principal Openness to Change, and .87 for Community Press for Change. Factor-analytic investigations confirm a robust three-factor oblique latent structure that accounts for substantial variance in school organizational responsiveness. The scale displays strong convergent and discriminant validity when measured alongside related organizational constructs such as academic optimism, collective teacher efficacy, enabling school structures, and faculty trust. By treating the school as an open social system, the FCOS serves as a foundational assessment tool for identifying cultural barriers to reform, measuring change readiness, and predicting the institutional sustainability of educational policy initiatives.

Keywords

Faculty Change Orientation Scale, FCOS, school reform, organizational readiness for change, educational leadership, faculty openness to change, principal openness to change, community press, school climate, psychometrics, educational administration, collective efficacy, organizational change.

Authors

The Faculty Change Orientation Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and empirically validated by educational administration and organizational leadership researchers W. Sean Kearney, Ed.D., and Paige A. Smith, Ph.D.

• W. Sean Kearney, Ed.D.: Professor of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. His research concentrates on organizational climate, educational leadership behaviors, academic optimism, and quantitative measurement models in public education.
• Paige A. Smith, Ph.D.: Professor and educational researcher formerly associated with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Dr. Smith’s scholarship centers on organizational health, organizational justice, institutional change, and psychometric instrument design within educational environments.
• Wayne K. Hoy, Ed.D. (Collaborator & Framework Architect): The Fawcett Professor Emeritus of Educational Administration at The Ohio State University. Dr. Hoy’s pioneering paradigms in educational organizations provided the theoretical foundation, editorial guidance, and archival hosting for the FCOS research initiative.

Purpose

Educational organizations face relentless pressure to adapt to pedagogical advancements, state and federal accountability mandates, technological integrations, and shifting demographic demands. Despite substantial investments into curricular overhauls and strategic reform packages, a large proportion of educational change initiatives fail during implementation. Organizational research demonstrates that structural adaptations cannot succeed in the absence of psychological and cultural readiness among front-line implementers and key institutional stakeholders.

The primary purpose of the Faculty Change Orientation Scale (FCOS) is to systematically measure the collective orientation toward innovation, restructuring, and programmatic change within school environments. Rather than viewing change orientation as an isolated individual personality trait, the FCOS measures change orientation as an institutional, shared organizational climate attribute. Specifically, the scale was created to:

• Diagnose Institutional Readiness for Reform: Identify the degree to which a school’s cultural climate is receptive, ambivalent, or actively resistant to new educational policies, pedagogical models, or administrative structural adjustments.
• Disaggregate Multi-Stakeholder Influence: Provide discrete diagnostic data on three distinct driving forces within the school ecosystem: the instructional staff (teachers), the executive leadership (the building principal), and the external environmental constituency (parents and the broader community).
• Mitigate Innovation Failure: Enable district leaders, superintendents, and organizational development consultants to detect internal structural inertia, managerial resistance, or community conservatism before allocating capital and professional development resources to large-scale reform efforts.
• Support Empirical School Effectiveness Research: Provide educational researchers with a standardized, reliable measurement tool for testing complex structural equation models examining relationships between leadership style, school climate, teacher collective efficacy, and student academic achievement.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the FCOS is Organizational Change Orientation within educational settings. In psychometrics and organizational psychology, change orientation refers to a collective mental model and behavioral readiness characterized by psychological safety, low cynicism, cognitive flexibility, and proactive openness toward novel procedures, structures, and goals. The FCOS establishes that school change orientation is inherently triadic, represented by three interrelated yet distinct sub-constructs:

1. Faculty Openness to Change

This 9-item subscale captures the shared normative beliefs, affective dispositions, and behavioral tendencies of the teaching faculty regarding educational innovation. A faculty characterized by high openness exhibits an experimental mindset, welcomes novel instructional methodologies, and demonstrates high resilience when confronted with policy revisions. Conversely, low openness reflects institutional cynicism, operational fatigue, entrenchment in existing instructional routines, and an active disposition to reject or passively subvert reform directives (e.g., “Faculty in this school would rather fight than switch”).

2. Principal Openness to Change

Comprising 6 items, this dimension assesses faculty perceptions of the school principal’s leadership orientation toward innovation, risk-taking, and adaptation. In school effectiveness literature, the principal operates as the primary institutional gatekeeper. A principal demonstrating high change openness models innovative practices, enthusiastically champions reform initiatives, and remains responsive to external suggestions. In contrast, low change openness manifests as bureaucratic obstructionism, administrative foot-dragging, and entrenched defensive preservation of the status quo (e.g., “the principal balks at new suggestions” and “is committed to no change”).

3. Community Press for Change

Spanning 4 items, this subscale measures the perceived external environmental pressure exerted by parents, community members, and institutional groups (such as Parent-Teacher Associations) toward educational evolution and institutional accountability. Schools operate as open social systems; when the community exerts an energetic “press” for change, it acts as an external catalyst that prevents organizational stagnation. Conversely, when community members are entirely passive or complacent regarding current institutional performance, the external impetus for modernization is diminished.

Theoretical Framework

The development of the Faculty Change Orientation Scale is anchored in the convergence of several major theories of organizational behavior, social psychology, and educational administration:

Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis and Three-Step Change Model

The conceptual bedrock of the FCOS draws directly from Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory and his classic change paradigm: Unfreezing → Moving → Refreezing. Lewin posited that any social system exists in a state of quasi-stationary equilibrium maintained by a dynamic balance between driving forces (forces pushing for change) and restraining forces (forces resisting change). The FCOS directly measures these opposing forces. Community Press and high Principal Openness serve as primary driving forces, while faculty skepticism, cynicism, and managerial inertia represent restraining forces that hinder unfreezing.

Open Systems Theory in Educational Administration

The instrument is grounded in the Open Systems Theory formulated by Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn, and operationalized in education by Wayne K. Hoy and Cecil G. Miskel. In an open system, an organization does not exist in a vacuum; it continuously exchanges energy, information, and resources with its external environment. By incorporating the external community alongside internal administrative and instructional personnel, the FCOS acknowledges that sustainable educational adaptation is a transactional process influenced by environmental inputs, structural throughputs, and institutional outputs.

Weiner’s Theory of Organizational Readiness for Change

The FCOS aligns with Bryan Weiner’s conceptualization of organizational readiness for change, which views readiness as a shared psychological state wherein organizational members feel committed to implementing a change and confident in their collective abilities to do so. High scores across the FCOS dimensions capture collective valence (valuing the change) and informational assessment of task demands, leadership support, and resource availability.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Faculty Change Orientation Scale was conducted through psychometric investigations across diverse samples of public elementary, middle, and high schools. Validation studies conducted by Kearney and Smith (2008), along with subsequent independent replications, provide strong empirical support across multiple forms of validity:

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was established through systematic exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The three proposed dimensions emerged consistently as discrete factors with clear simple structure. Item-factor loadings were uniformly high, confirming that each item functions as an accurate empirical indicator of its intended theoretical construct without problematic cross-loadings.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating the FCOS subscales with theoretically allied constructs from the school climate literature:

• Enabling School Structures: Significant positive correlations were found between Faculty Openness to Change and enabling school structures ($r \approx .58, p < .001$), indicating that organizations with flexible, two-way communication rules foster greater receptivity to innovation.
• Faculty Trust in Colleagues and the Principal: Measures of faculty trust correlated strongly with both Faculty Openness ($r = .62, p < .001$) and Principal Openness ($r = .67, p < .001$), demonstrating that psychological safety is a critical antecedent to change orientation.
• Academic Optimism: School-wide academic optimism correlated positively with both Faculty Openness and Community Press for Change, validating the hypothesis that forward-looking, high-efficacy schools maintain higher orientations toward growth and change.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was confirmed through moderate, non-redundant intercorrelations among the three subscales (ranging from $r = .31$ to $r = .52$). These correlations demonstrate that while the three facets are related components of the overall school climate, they do not duplicate one another. For example, a school may display high Community Press for Change alongside low Faculty Openness, illustrating that external demand does not automatically equate to internal receptivity.

Reliability

The FCOS displays exceptional psychometric reliability. Classical test theory analyses conducted across multi-school normative samples demonstrate high internal consistency for all three subscales:

• Faculty Openness to Change (9 items): Achieved a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of $\alpha = .95$. This very high internal consistency coefficient reflects strong item homogeneity and minimal measurement error, rendering it suitable for both institutional benchmarking and research applications.
• Principal Openness to Change (6 items): Yielded an internal consistency coefficient of $\alpha = .87$, demonstrating that the items reliably measure administrative adaptability and leadership support.
• Community Press for Change (4 items): Yielded an internal consistency coefficient of $\alpha = .87$, confirming that the 4 items provide a coherent metric of perceived external environmental press.

Because the FCOS is administered to individual teachers to derive an aggregate, school-level climate metric, organizational researchers have examined within-group agreement ($r_{wg}$) and intraclass correlation coefficients ($ICC(1)$ and $ICC(2)$). These investigations confirmed that variance between schools significantly exceeds variance within schools, supporting the aggregation of individual teacher scores to the organizational level of analysis.

Factor Analysis

During the initial psychometric derivation of the instrument, Kearney and Smith conducted an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on an initial pool of change-related items using principal axis factoring with oblique (Promax) rotation, accommodating the theoretical intercorrelations among school social dimensions.

The analysis yielded a definitive three-factor solution based on the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues $> 1.0$) and scree plot inspections. The three factors accounted for more than 60% of the total cumulative variance in the item matrix:

• Factor 1 (Faculty Openness): Items 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, and 15 loaded cleanly onto this factor, with standardized pattern coefficients ranging from .64 to .91.
• Factor 2 (Principal Openness): Items 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, and 19 loaded onto this administrative factor, with pattern coefficients between .61 and .88.
• Factor 3 (Community Press): Items 4, 16, 17, and 18 formed the third dimension, displaying factor loadings between .58 and .84.

Subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) models testing the hypothesized three-factor structure against competing unidimensional and orthogonal models demonstrated superior model fit indices: $\chi^2 / df < 2.1$, Comparative Fit Index ($CFI$) ≥ .94, Tucker-Lewis Index ($TLI$) ≥ .93, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($RMSEA$) ≤ .058, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($SRMR$) ≤ .049. These fit indices confirm the structural integrity of the three-factor model.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Organizational climate survey / Psychometric rating scale (aggregate unit-level measurement).
• Target Population: Certified PK–12 instructional personnel, educational specialists, and school administrators.
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital online survey form.
• Administration Time: Approximately 7 to 10 minutes.
• Total Item Count: 19 items.
• Response Continuum: 6-point Likert-type scale anchored as follows:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Somewhat Agree
  • 5 = Agree
  • 6 = Strongly Agree
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Faculty Openness to Change (9 items): Items 1, 2, 5, 6*, 8, 10*, 13*, 14*, 15
  • Principal Openness to Change (6 items): Items 3*, 7*, 9, 11*, 12, 19*
  • Community Press for Change (4 items): Items 4, 16, 17, 18*
• Scoring and Transformation Procedures:
  • Asterisked items (*) are negatively worded and must be reverse-scored prior to computation ($1 \rightarrow 6$, $2 \rightarrow 5$, $3 \rightarrow 4$, $4 \rightarrow 3$, $5 \rightarrow 2$, $6 \rightarrow 1$).
  • Subscale scores for each respondent are calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of the respective items.
  • To compute the school-level organizational score, individual respondent means across a campus are aggregated into a single school mean for each dimension.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2008.
• Original Publication Venue: Kearney, W. S., & Smith, P. A. (2008). “A theoretical and empirical analysis of change orientations in schools.” In W. K. Hoy & M. DiPaola (Eds.), Studies in School Improvement (pp. 209–230). Information Age Publishing.
• Open Access and Licensing Policy: In accordance with the academic dissemination mission of Wayne K. Hoy and the instrument developers, the Faculty Change Orientation Scale (FCOS) is placed in the public domain for non-commercial educational, scholarly, and diagnostic research purposes. Researchers and school leaders may utilize, reproduce, and administer the instrument free of royalty fees, provided proper academic attribution is cited in all resulting reports, theses, dissertations, and publications.
• Instrument Repository: The scale documentation, scoring instructions, and associated research tools are archived and openly accessible via Wayne K. Hoy’s research repository at www.waynekhoy.com.

References

• Armenakis, A. A., Harris, S. G., & Mossholder, K. W. (1993). Creating readiness for organizational change. Human Relations, 46(6), 681–703. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679304600601
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Fullan, M. (2007). The new meaning of educational change (4th ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Hoy, W. K., & DiPaola, M. (Eds.). (2008). Studies in school improvement. Information Age Publishing.
• Hoy, W. K., & Miskel, C. G. (2013). Educational administration: Theory, research, and practice (9th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Hoy, W. K., Tarter, C. J., & Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2006). Academic optimism of schools: A force for student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 43(3), 425–446. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312043003425
• Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The social psychology of organizations (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
• Kearney, W. S., & Smith, P. A. (2008). A theoretical and empirical analysis of change orientations in schools. In W. K. Hoy & M. DiPaola (Eds.), Studies in school improvement (pp. 209–230). Information Age Publishing.
• Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. Harper & Row.
• Tschannen-Moran, M., & Hoy, W. K. (2000). A multidisciplinary analysis of the nature, meaning, and measurement of trust. Review of Educational Research, 70(4), 547–593. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070004547
• Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4, Article 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67

Items of the Scale