THE Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools (OCDQ-RE)

Abstract

The Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools (OCDQ-RE) is a 42-item diagnostic psychometric instrument developed by Wayne K. Hoy, C. John Tarter, and Robert B. Kottkamp (1991) to assess the internal social and professional environments of primary educational institutions. Originating as a comprehensive conceptual and empirical revision of Andrew Halpin and Don B. Croft’s pioneering 1963 Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), the OCDQ-RE was specifically re-engineered to capture the nuanced relational dynamics between elementary school principals and instructional faculty. The instrument conceptualizes school climate along a primary continuum ranging from an Open Climate—marked by authentic, cooperative interactions, supportive leadership, and professional engagement—to a Closed Climate—characterized by rigid supervision, administrative obstruction, teacher disengagement, and superficial social ties.

The OCDQ-RE comprises six psychometrically validated subscales divided into two functional domains: Principal Behavior, which assesses Supportive Behavior (9 items), Directive Behavior (9 items), and Restrictive Behavior (5 items); and Teacher Behavior, which measures Collegial Behavior (8 items), Intimate Behavior (7 items), and Disengaged Behavior (4 items). Respondents evaluate statements using a 4-point Likert-type frequency scale ranging from 1 (“rarely occurs”) to 4 (“very frequently occurs”). Across extensive normative and cross-validation samples, the OCDQ-RE exhibits exemplary internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .78 to .94 across subscales. Construct, convergent, and criterion-related validity have been robustly demonstrated through significant correlations with measures of school organizational health, faculty trust, teacher sense of academic optimism, collective efficacy, and student academic performance. The OCDQ-RE remains one of the most widely utilized and methodologically sound measurement systems in educational administration, organizational psychology, and institutional climate research.

Keywords

Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools, OCDQ-RE, school organizational climate, open climate, Wayne K. Hoy, principal leadership behavior, collegial teacher behavior, elementary school environment, educational administration, organizational psychology, school assessment, psychometrics

Authors

The OCDQ-RE was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a collaborative team of distinguished scholars in educational administration and organizational behavior:

• Wayne K. Hoy, Ed.D. — Fawcett Professor Emeritus of Educational Administration at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States. Dr. Hoy is an internationally recognized theorist who has published extensively on educational organizational theory, faculty trust, school climate, and academic optimism.
• C. John Tarter, Ed.D. — Professor Emeritus of Educational Administration at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and later St. John’s University, Queens, New York, United States. Dr. Tarter’s scholarly work focuses on administrative decision-making, organizational climate, and school leadership dynamics.
• Robert B. Kottkamp, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Foundations, Leadership, and Policy Studies at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, United States. Dr. Kottkamp has contributed extensively to research regarding organizational climate, reflective practice, and leadership development in public education.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools (OCDQ-RE) is to provide a theoretically anchored, methodologically rigorous, and operationally viable instrument capable of diagnosing the institutional and interpersonal climate of elementary schools. During the mid-20th century, Halpin and Croft’s (1963) original 64-item OCDQ catalyzed school climate research; however, psychometricians and educational researchers gradually identified serious structural limitations in the original instrument. The 1963 OCDQ exhibited unstable factor structures across disparate educational levels, conflated primary and secondary organizational dynamics, and utilized complex, non-replicable mathematical profile-matching techniques to assign climate classifications. Recognizing that elementary schools function as distinct socio-ecological entities characterized by smaller staff sizes, flatter administrative hierarchies, unique developmental demands, and intensive teacher-student pastoral care, Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp (1991) developed the OCDQ-RE to capture the specific operational realities of primary schools.

In research contexts, the OCDQ-RE serves as a standardized operational tool to investigate the relationships between school organizational dynamics and systemic educational variables. It allows researchers to quantify how organizational openness moderates or mediates outcomes such as teacher turnover intentions, occupational burnout, collective teacher efficacy, pupil control ideology, faculty trust in leadership, and standardized student academic achievement. The tool resolves multilevel aggregation challenges in organizational research by providing items that evaluate shared perceptions of collective behavior rather than idiosyncratic individual affect, allowing for legitimate statistical aggregation from the individual teacher level to the institutional school level (multilevel modeling).

From an applied clinical and diagnostic perspective, the OCDQ-RE functions as an organizational intervention and organizational development (OD) tool for superintendents, school principals, organizational consultants, and school improvement teams. Administering the scale enables school leaders to systematically map faculty perceptions across six critical behavioral axes. Rather than relying on anecdotal impressions or intuition, educational administrators can identify specific structural impediments to institutional health—such as excessive administrative paperwork, autocratic supervisory monitoring, or teacher factionalism—and design targeted leadership interventions to foster a more collegial, supportive, and open educational environment.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the OCDQ-RE is school organizational climate, specifically defined as the enduring, collective interpersonal and professional perceptions held by organizational members regarding the organizational behavioral norms of both the formal leadership (the principal) and the professional peer group (the teachers). Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp conceptualize organizational climate as the institutional “personality” of a school, constructed through ongoing social interactions and cognitive appraisals of organizational practices. The OCDQ-RE parses this global climate construct into two structural domains—Principal Behavior and Teacher Behavior—each delineated by three distinct, factorially independent subscales.

1. Dimensions of Principal Behavior

• Supportive Behavior (9 items): Characterizes leadership marked by constructive, professional, and empathetic interaction with the instructional staff. Supportive principals direct the organization through encouragement rather than coercion, provide genuine praise and appreciation, attend to teachers’ personal and professional welfare, listen attentively to staff suggestions, and treat educators as professional equals. Example statement: “The principal goes out of his/her way to help teachers.”
• Directive Behavior (9 items): Reflects rigid, autocratic, and task-dominated administrative supervision. A directive principal retains absolute authority, establishes an autocratic organizational hierarchy, closely monitors classroom routines, demands compliance with detailed lesson planning mandates, and exercises unyielding administrative control over daily teacher activities without meaningful collaborative input. Example statement: “The principal rules with an iron fist.”
• Restrictive Behavior (5 items): Depicts administrative behaviors and bureaucratic demands that actively impede the instructional core of teaching. Rather than facilitating professional tasks, the principal burdens teachers with excessive clerical responsibilities, routine paperwork, extraneous committee assignments, and busy work that consumes time needed for instructional planning. Example statement: “Routine duties interfere with the job of teaching.”

2. Dimensions of Teacher Behavior

• Collegial Behavior (8 items): Represents supportive, respectful, and highly professional peer-to-peer interactions among the instructional faculty. In a collegial environment, teachers display pride in their school, respect the professional competence of their colleagues, welcome new faculty, work with enthusiasm and pleasure, and maintain a cooperative commitment to institutional goals. Example statement: “Teachers respect the professional competence of their colleagues.”
• Intimate Behavior (7 items): Captures a cohesive, warm network of personal and social support among teachers outside and alongside formal workplace obligations. This dimension assesses personal friendships among faculty members, regular social gatherings, mutual familiarity with family backgrounds, and spontaneous interpersonal care. Example statement: “Teachers’ closest friends are other faculty members at this school.”
• Disengaged Behavior (4 items): Reflects widespread behavioral apathy, lack of focus, alienation, and professional non-commitment among the faculty. Teachers display passive-aggressive resistance, view professional development and faculty meetings as pointless rituals, form divisive minority cliques that systematically oppose initiatives, and exert little collective effort toward educational objectives. Example statement: “Faculty meetings are useless.”

Together, these six subscales map onto a conceptual typology that contrasts the Open Climate with the Closed Climate. An open school climate is characterized by exceptionally high scores on Supportive and Collegial behavior paired with exceptionally low scores on Directive, Restrictive, and Disengaged behavior. Conversely, a closed climate features an autocratic, restrictive principal and an alienated, disengaged, and non-collaborative teaching staff.

Theoretical Framework

The OCDQ-RE is grounded in Open Systems Theory (Katz & Kahn, 1978), sociological frameworks of structural functionalism (Parsons, 1951), and contemporary social exchange paradigms within organizational sociology. Open systems theory posits that schools are social organizations in continuous transaction with external socio-political environments. Internal survival, adaptability, and performance depend heavily on the alignment between formal administrative subsystems (the principalship) and informal cultural and socio-emotional subsystems (the faculty peer group).

Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp integrated these macro-level systems perspectives with Halpin and Croft’s (1963) foundational interactionist paradigm. Halpin and Croft posited that organizational climate emerges not from isolated administrative decrees or individual teacher traits, but from the reciprocal dynamic between administrative leadership behavior and faculty peer relations. When Hoy and colleagues revised the instrument, they removed ambiguous constructs from the original 1963 inventory—such as “Production Emphasis” and “Thrust”—replacing them with psychometrically distinct and behaviorally unambiguous dimensions that mirror classical leadership and human relations paradigms:

• Task vs. Relations Orientation: Drawing on the foundational leadership studies conducted at Ohio State University (Halpin, 1959; Stogdill, 1963), the OCDQ-RE operationalizes leadership as balancing Consideration (Supportive Behavior) and Initiating Structure (Directive and Restrictive Behaviors).
• Professional Autonomy vs. Bureaucratic Control: Grounded in Max Weber’s structural bureaucracy theories and modern professional autonomy paradigms, the instrument measures the tension between administrative oversight and professional teacher agency. In high-performing professional bureaucracies, instructional staff require structural protection from clerical interference to maintain pedagogical autonomy.
• Social Cohesion vs. Anomie: Rooted in sociological perspectives on group dynamics, the teacher subscales differentiate between formal professional cohesion (Collegial Behavior), informal emotional attachment (Intimate Behavior), and institutional alienation (Disengaged Behavior).

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the OCDQ-RE have been thoroughly documented across four decades of empirical investigations involving thousands of elementary school campuses.

Construct and Factorial Validity

During the initial development and validation phase, Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp (1991) administered an experimental battery of 70 climate items to an initial calibration sample of 70 elementary schools encompassing 1,071 professional educators across New Jersey. Rigorous exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation reliably isolated the six conceptualized dimensions, reducing the instrument to 42 items with robust structural properties. All retained items exhibited strong factor loadings (predominantly > .50) on their designated target factor with negligible cross-loadings (< .30) on alternative dimensions.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Substantial empirical evidence supports the construct differentiation between the OCDQ-RE and related organizational instruments:

• Organizational Health Inventory for Elementary Schools (OHI-E): Multitrait-multimethod analyses demonstrated strong, conceptually predicted correlations between OCDQ-RE Openness indices and the Institutional Integrity, Teacher Affiliation, and Principal Influence dimensions of the OHI-E (Hoy & Tarter, 1997).
• Faculty Trust: Studies examining school interpersonal dynamics consistently reveal strong positive associations between OCDQ-RE Principal Openness and teacher trust in the principal (r values typically exceeding .65, p < .001), as well as between Teacher Openness and faculty trust in colleagues (Hoy, Smith, & Sweetland, 2002).
• Pupil Control Ideology (PCI): Research has linked humanistic pupil control orientations among teachers with open organizational climates, whereas custodial, punitive student management approaches correlate positively with restrictive and directive principal behavior (Hoy et al., 1991).

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The predictive utility of the OCDQ-RE has been repeatedly confirmed across diverse educational outcomes:

• Student Achievement: Longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) have found that elementary schools exhibiting high Teacher Openness and low Disengaged Behavior consistently achieve statistically significantly higher standardized test scores in mathematics and reading (Hoy et al., 1991; Sweetland & Hoy, 2000).
• Teacher Retention and Job Satisfaction: Supportive and Collegial behaviors correlate inversely with voluntary teacher attrition, physical burnout, and psychological withdrawal, while showing strong positive predictive validity for teacher organizational commitment and overall job satisfaction.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the OCDQ-RE is firmly established, demonstrating exceptional internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse independent samples.

Internal Consistency

In the original normative validation study by Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp (1991; N = 70 schools, 1,071 teachers), internal consistency analysis utilizing Cronbach’s alpha yielded coefficients well in excess of the recognized .70 benchmark for organizational diagnostic instruments:

• Supportive Behavior: $\alpha = .94$ (9 items)
• Directive Behavior: $\alpha = .88$ (9 items)
• Restrictive Behavior: $\alpha = .81$ (5 items)
• Collegial Behavior: $\alpha = .87$ (8 items)
• Intimate Behavior: $\alpha = .83$ (7 items)
• Disengaged Behavior: $\alpha = .78$ (4 items)

Subsequent independent validation studies conducted across rural, suburban, and urban school systems in the United States and internationally have replicated these values, consistently yielding alpha coefficients between .76 and .95.

Aggregation Reliability and Agreement Statistics

Because the OCDQ-RE measures shared institutional climate, psychometricians assess within-group agreement and reliability of aggregated group means:

• Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICC): Significant between-school variance is routinely observed. Typical $ICC(1)$ values range between .18 and .35, confirming that climate perceptions are systematically influenced by school membership rather than individual response bias. $ICC(2)$ group-mean reliabilities consistently range from .78 to .91, indicating that aggregated school-level climate scores possess high stability.
• Test-Retest Stability: Studies measuring stability over 6- to 12-month periods demonstrate test-retest correlations between .72 and .84 in the absence of deliberate administrative restructuring or principal turnover, illustrating that climate constitutes an enduring organizational attribute.

Factor Analysis

The structural validity of the OCDQ-RE was derived through extensive factor-analytic procedures designed to identify the latent behavioral architecture of primary school organizations.

First-Order Factor Structure

Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp (1991) executed exploratory factor analyses utilizing principal axis factoring and principal components analysis with orthogonal (varimax) and oblique (promax) rotations on a 70-school dataset. Factor extraction guided by the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and scree plot inspections unambiguously yielded six stable first-order factors that accounted for the majority of common variance. Items demonstrating low primary loadings (< .40) or complex cross-loadings (> .30 on secondary factors) were systematically eliminated, producing the refined 42-item structure.

Second-Order Factor Structure and Confirmatory Analysis

Second-order factor analyses conducted on the intercorrelations among the six subscales confirmed two higher-order structural factors corresponding to Principal Openness and Teacher Openness. Supportive Behavior loads positively on Principal Openness, while Directive and Restrictive behaviors load negatively. Similarly, Collegial and Intimate behaviors load positively on Teacher Openness, while Disengaged Behavior loads strongly in the negative direction. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have supported this hierarchical structure, reporting excellent goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., $\chi^2/df < 2.2$, $CFI > .92$, $TLI > .91$, $RMSEA < .055$).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Formal Tool Name: Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools (OCDQ-RE)
• Assessment Type: Self-report organizational climate survey administered to professional instructional personnel (faculty members and teachers)
• Target Population: Certified elementary school teachers, instructional specialists, and school administrators
• Item Count: 42 items
• Response Scale: 4-point Likert-type frequency rating scale:
  • 1 = rarely occurs
  • 2 = sometimes occurs
  • 3 = often occurs
  • 4 = very frequently occurs
• Reverse-Scored Items: Items 6, 31, and 37 must be reverse scored prior to calculating subscale sums (i.e., $1 to 4$, $2 to 3$, $3 to 2$, $4 to 1$).
• Subscale Allocation Formulas:
  • Supportive Behavior (S): Items 4 + 9 + 15 + 16 + 22 + 23 + 28 + 29 + 42
  • Directive Behavior (D): Items 5 + 10 + 17 + 24 + 30 + 34 + 35 + 39 + 41
  • Restrictive Behavior (R): Items 11 + 18 + 25 + 31[Rev] + 36
  • Collegial Behavior (C): Items 1 + 6[Rev] + 12 + 19 + 26 + 32 + 37[Rev] + 40
  • Intimate Behavior (Int): Items 2 + 7 + 13 + 20 + 27 + 33 + 38
  • Disengaged Behavior (Dis): Items 3 + 8 + 14 + 21
• Scoring and Standardization Protocol:
  1. Calculate individual subscale totals for each respondent following reverse-scoring transformations.
  2. Calculate the school mean for each subscale by aggregating all individual teacher responses within that school campus.
  3. Convert raw school subscale means into standardized scores ($SdS$) using the normative database formulas ($Mean = 500$, $SD = 100$) detailed in Hoy, Tarter, and Kottkamp (1991):
     • $SdS \text{ for Supportive} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_S – 23.47)/3.92 + 500$
     • $SdS \text{ for Directive} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_D – 17.53)/2.86 + 500$
     • $SdS \text{ for Restrictive} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_R – 10.36)/1.72 + 500$
     • $SdS \text{ for Collegial} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_C – 24.34)/2.38 + 500$
     • $SdS \text{ for Intimate} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_{Int} – 16.59)/2.24 + 500$
     • $SdS \text{ for Disengaged} = 100 \times (\bar{X}_{Dis} – 6.54)/1.15 + 500$
  4. Compute composite openness indices:
     • Principal Openness: $\frac{SdS_S + (1000 – SdS_D) + (1000 – SdS_R)}{3}$
     • Teacher Openness: $\frac{SdS_C + SdS_{Int} + (1000 – SdS_{Dis})}{3}$
     • Overall School Openness: $\frac{\text{Principal Openness} + \text{Teacher Openness}}{2}$

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Organizational Climate Description for Elementary Schools (OCDQ-RE) was published in 1991 by Sage Publications in the monograph Open Schools/Healthy Schools: Measuring Organizational Climate by Wayne K. Hoy, C. John Tarter, and Robert B. Kottkamp. In keeping with the authors’ commitment to advancing educational administration and empirical research, the OCDQ-RE is an open-access, non-commercial assessment instrument. No royalty fees or copyright permission costs are charged for non-profit scholarly research, master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, or internal institutional evaluations conducted by school districts.

The instrument, scoring templates, normative databases, and manual are maintained and made available through Dr. Wayne K. Hoy’s official academic repository (www.waynekhoy.com). Scholarly use requires proper academic attribution and formal citation of the authors’ original 1991 foundational publication. Commercial distribution, reproduction in fee-based digital survey platforms, or inclusion within proprietary diagnostic consulting packages requires prior written permission from the copyright holders.

References

• Halpin, A. W., & Croft, D. B. (1963). The organizational climate of schools. Chicago: Midwest Administration Center, University of Chicago. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED002897
• Hoy, W. K., Smith, P. A., & Sweetland, S. R. (2002). The development of the Organizational Climate Index for high schools: Its measure and relationship to faculty trust. The High School Journal, 86(2), 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/hsj.2002.0023
• Hoy, W. K., & Tarter, C. J. (1997). The road to open and healthy schools: A handbook for change (Elementary Edition). Corwin Press.
• Hoy, W. K., Tarter, C. J., & Kottkamp, R. B. (1991). Open schools/healthy schools: Measuring organizational climate. Sage Publications.
• Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The social psychology of organizations (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
• Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Free Press.
• Sweetland, S. R., & Hoy, W. K. (2000). School characteristics and educational outcomes: Toward an organizational model of student achievement in middle schools. Educational Administration Quarterly, 36(5), 703–729. https://doi.org/10.1177/00131610021969173

Items of the Scale