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This report is the fifth in a series that examines officer career development. Three unrestricted line officer communities were examined: air warfare, surface warfare, and general unrestricted line. Officers were asked to write about the career problems of their communities, especially those affecting their desire to stay or leave the Navy. Approximately 500 comment sheets were content analyzed from each community, and problems were rank ordered according to their perceived severity. Common problem areas across the communities were interactions with assignment managers (detailers), the promotion system, and managerial practices. Recommendations were offered regarding further research and some preliminary step the Navy might take to solve the identified problems. Keywords: Detailers; Career management; Bargaining style; Assignment management; Womens issues; Career development.

Underlying assumptions and rationale of psychological climate are addressed from the perspectives of cognitive social learning theory and interactional psychology. Major emphasis was placed on the implications of these theoretical models for psychological climate. It is suggested that psychological climate: (1) Reflects psychologically meaningful, cognitive representations of situations rather than automatic reflections of specific situational events; (2) Is generally more important than the objective situation in the prediction of many salient individual dependent variables; (3) Is predicted on developmental experience, and frequently involves conflicting orientations generated by the preservation of valued and familiar schemas, on one hand, and openness to change in the interest of achieving adaptive and functional person-environment fits, on the other; and (4) Is related reciprocally to memory, affect, and behavior in a causal model which predicts a reciprocal causation between perception and affect, and individuals and environments.

The present study represented an attempt to develop a comprehensive measure of psychological climate and to investigate the appropriateness of aggregating psychological climate scores to describe subunit or organizational climate. Theoretical assumptions underlying the two constructs were reviewed and relationships with various situational, positional, and individual variables were posited as indices of construct validity. Analyses indicated that: (a) five of six psychological climate dimensions found for 4,315 U.S. Navy enlisted men were generalizable to comparison samples of firemen (n=398) and health care managers (n=504); (b) aggregating psychological climate scores to describe subunit climates appeared appropriate only for homogeneous subunits (e.g., divisions); (c) subunit climates were significantly related to division context, structure, and personnel composition, while psychological climate appeared more related to individual resources and position variables.