Supportive Organizational Context for Teams: A Study of Construct Validity

Abstract

Despite a call within scientific literature to better account for contextual factors in team studies, very little research has systematically analyzed the potentially critical role of such factors, thus limiting organizations’ ability to provide contextual conditions that would foster team effectiveness. The Supportive Organizational Context for Teams (SOCT) construct effectively captures some of these factors (rewards, information, education, and resource allocation). However, while the internal consistency of the SOCT has been analyzed, its multidimensional representation has never been tested. In this study, we address these limitations by assessing the factor structure of a measure proposed by Wageman et al. (2005) and of its distinctive nature in relation to Perceived Organizational Support. Using a sample of 235 participants and the newly developed bifactor-ESEM framework, this study supports the notion that a high-order model is superior to a first-order model, and SOCT and Perceived Organizational Support are distinct from one another.