ClimateQUAL : Advancing Organizational Health, Leadership, and Diversity in the Service of Libraries

ClimateQUAL® is a toolkit that provides the ultimate management tool in a library setting for effective organizational adaptation by employing deep assessment of a library’s staff opinions that plumb the dimensions of climate and organizational culture. It has produced important new research findings over the 15 year period it has been applied.

This book describes the application of The ClimateQUAL® survey protocol (originally Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment–OCDA©) to over 55 libraries with thousands of individual respondents in the US, Canada and UK. The ClimateQUAL toolkit provides the ultimate management tool for effective organizational adaptation by employing deep assessment of a library’s staff opinions to plumb the dimensions of climate and organizational culture important for a healthy organization in a library setting. It tests critical attitudes around 26 validated dimensions. The ClimateQUAL survey measures include work attitudes, diversity climate, leadership and several other dimensions of library climate. The book describes the procedure for evaluating the structure and psychometric properties of each of these scales. The survey protocol provides feedback based on normative data from the libraries that have already participated. By using these normative scales and institutional results effectively, significant improvements can be achieved. Among other results, the ClimateQUAL research shows that the most effective techniques for remediation are not top-down, but those that engage the entire staff. The book touches on all significant findings of the 15-year project, including the positive impact of diversity on customer service experience and the emerging understanding of a new concept—the healthy organization—and how it is built. A full view is provided of the history and experience with ClimateQUAL since its inception and its use in libraries.