A commentary on: ‘‘Creating agile organizations through IT: The influence of IT service climate on IT service quality and IT agility” Ronnie Jia a,⇑ , Blaize Horner Reich b , Heather H. Jia a a Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761, USA b Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 1. Introduction Previous studies developed and validated a construct called IT Service Climate (Jia and Reich, 2013; Jia et al., 2008) based on organizational psychology research which defined service climate as ‘‘the shared perceptions of employees concerning the practices, procedures, and kinds of behaviors that get rewarded and supported” in a service setting (Schneider, 1990). Service climates in IT units were shown to significantly influence the service quality received by their respective business client units (Jia and Reich, 2013). Lowry and Wilson (2016) replicated these results and extended the nomological net to investigate how IT service climate and service quality influence organizational IT agility. This is a meaningful question to pursue – while it is important to know that internal service climate fosters satisfied clients, it is more strategic to understand how service climate might impact other organizational outcomes, such as agility. As IT managers try to improve service and demonstrate business value, these relationships may prove to be pivotal. In addition to the extended model, Lowry and Wilson (2016) have also departed from prior work in two other significant ways: (1) IT service climate was studied at the individual as opposed to the aggregate level, and (2) data used to test the model was gathered from workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, rather than from an organizational sample. We thank the Editor-in-Chief for inviting us to comment on this paper and take this opportunity to share a few of our thoughts about the above two issues and discuss their implications for IT service climate and the broader strategic IS research. 2. Service climate: Shared vs. individual cognition Climate researchers have long made a distinction between levels at which climate is conceptualized. For example, James and Jones (1974) described individuals’ perceptions of the workplace as psychological climates and the combination of these individuals’ perceptions at the group or organizational level as organizational climate. Jia et al. (2008) further summarized this literature (p298): In order to argue for the existence of a climate beyond the individual level, it is necessary to provide evidence that there is a high level of ‘‘sharedness” in cognition among individuals. The most common procedure is to use a mean or aggregated score across individuals and then demonstrate some form of within-group agreement (e.g., James et al., 1984)... Large variability in percep- tions among members indicates that aggregated perceptions do not adequately represent a construct of climate at the higher level (James, 1982). In other words, there is either a fragmented organizational climate or no organizational climate at all (Ostroff et al., 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2016.06.001 0963-8687/Ó 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: rjia@ilstu.edu (R. Jia), breich@sfu.ca (B.H. Reich), hhjia@ilstu.edu (H.H. Jia). Journal of Strategic Information Systems xxx (2016) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Strategic Information Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsis Please cite this article in press as: Jia, R., et al. A commentary on: ‘‘Creating agile organizations through IT: The influence of IT service cli- mate on IT service quality and IT agility”. J. Strateg. Inform. Syst. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2016.06.001