INNOVATION AND GROUP CLIMATE: THE INTRODUCTION AND VALIDATION OF THE GROUP CLIMATE INVENTORYS HUNGARIAN VERSION (Innovacio es csoportklima: A Csoportklima kerdoiv magyar valtozatanak bemutatasa es pszichometriai vizsgalata)

Innovation has become a salient topic of the 21st century and it is often considered to be a key factor to maintaining organizational competitiveness. It is in the center of interest of several scientific specialties, including the attention of researchers and practitioners as well. Despite the different perspectives different specialties take, the scientific literature mainly focuses on identifying, aligning and presenting the facilitating antecedents of innovation. Among these antecedents, the early studies had the organizational or group structure and the attributes of people - especially the leaders - in the center of attention. In the last few years, however, we have witnessed a shift in research towards organizational culture and climate. Parallel to this tendency, a change in the level of analysis has occurred as well. Nowadays, significantly more studies choose the group level instead of investigating the organization as a whole than even a decade ago. To capture group climate that facilitates innovation, West introduced the four-factor theory in 1990. The model identifies four crucial factors of climate for innovation: vision, participative safety, task orientation, and support for innovation. Based on the four-factor theory, Anderson and West (1998) has developed the Team Climate Inventory (TCI), which enables professionals to measure and capture climate in a numerical form. Since the development of the inventory, numerous studies have investigated the psychometric properties of TCI and tested its adoption to different languages. The aim of the current study is to present the model and the Hungarian version of the TCI tested on a sample of 30 workgroups. The 30 groups belong to the same governmental institution, including teams from four county-level and a city-level institutes. To test the reliability of the inventory, Cronbach's Alpha was counted for the four sub-scales and for the entire inventory. The high values of Cronbach's Alpha show the reliability of the inventory. To test the structure of the test, factor analysis was performed. The results are in line with those of the previous non-Hungarian studies. The initial results, therefore, support the usefulness of the Hungarian version.