The development of the Organizational Cooperation Questionnaire (QCO) for portuguese public local administration sector

Abstract

Cooperation is a key concept for working teams. It is also a widely used expression in our organizational management and in the enterprises regulation documents. Developing, sharing, transferring are all important processes for organizational working which need several individuals cooperating together. However is this cooperation really happening in our organizations? During the present investigation we have developed the Organizational Cooperation Questionnaire (QCO) with the intention to measure several aspects well established in the cooperation literature. The aim was to provide an instrument with good psychometric qualities, to scientific community and organizational managers, starting from the public sector administration. The QCO was applied to 1354 employees of random sample from 81 public local administrations in Portugal. The results from Exploratory Factorial Analysis (EFA) show a structure composed by three factors, named cooperation for working team purpose, cooperation based in norms and cooperation for citizenship purpose. The characterization of the cooperation in the public local administration sector shows medium to low levels of this construct.