The Shift Climate Scale measures how a focal frontline employee (FLE) perceives the customer-orientation of the co-workers sharing their current or most recent shift. It is explicitly distinct from three established constructs: (1) service climate, which captures employees' perceptions of management's organisational policies and reward systems; (2) unit customer orientation climate, which reflects managerial implementation of customer focus at the store level; and (3) individual customer orientation, a stable dispositional trait. Shift climate is inherently variable — it fluctuates shift to shift as different co-workers populate irregular rosters — and captures real-time group dynamics that the stable constructs cannot. Grounded in social baseline theory, the construct reflects the premise that FLEs regard their co-workers as resources for service provision: when the shift group is perceived as highly customer-focused, individual FLEs benefit from load-sharing and positive emotional contagion, enabling stronger in-role, extra-role, and helping behaviours. The scale was validated across three studies using an experience sampling methodology (ESM) in food service settings, showing incremental predictive validity for FLE behavioural outcomes and, critically, for customer-reported loyalty intentions collected independently from customers matched to specific shifts (Study 3: 1,916 customers nested within 183 shifts within 74 FLEs).
7-point Likert (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree); respondents directed to think about the last shift they worked
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Scale instructions direct respondents to think specifically about the last shift they worked, making it appropriate for experience sampling / repeated-measures designs. The four items were written by the current authors; items asking about co-workers' caring, enjoyment, or beliefs were dropped in development as individual FLEs cannot readily observe these. AVE values are not reported in the source paper for shift climate specifically; CR alone is reported. A companion Shift Risk Management scale (6 items, adapted substantially from Kim 2019, JEIM) appears in the same paper but individual reliability statistics are not reported; it is therefore held from this database pending independent replication. Shift mood (Green et al. 1993 bipolar adjective pairs, 8 items) acts as a moderator in the model but is a verbatim lift from a named prior source and is not included here.
Fehl, A. G., Good, V., Arnold, T., Slevitch, L., & Pasham, M. (2026). Shift climate: How perceptions of fellow frontline employees drive behaviors and customer loyalty. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-025-01132-2
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