A Brief Measure of Organizational Wellness Climate: Initial Validation and Focus on Small Businesses and Substance Misuse.

Abstract

Organizations with fewer than 100 employees comprise most businesses in the United States. Since small businesses lack comparable resources, they may benefit from a simple valid tool for broadly assessing positive wellness climate, especially because climate contributes to employee wellbeing. Using an ethnically and occupationally diverse sample of 45 businesses (n = 1512), the current study developed and tested a brief self-report measure of organizational wellness climate. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that a 9-item measure has good model fit (RMSEA = 0.06, CFI = 0.91), inter-item consistency of 0.74, and mean Rwg(j) of 0.87. The new measure is significantly positively correlated with physical health and wellbeing, and negatively correlated with substance use behavior. Findings indicate that a 9-item measure has good reliability, construct, and criterion validity. Implications for practical use of the measure are discussed.