COOPERATION IN RESEARCH TEAMS: AN EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION QUESTIONNAIRE

Cooperation within organizations has been considered a key asset for organizational performance; effectiveness and overall success. The aim of the present research is to study the psychometric properties of the Organizational Cooperation Questionnaire in a sample of research team members. The innovation of this study is in assessing organizational cooperation in a sample which has not been widely researched. Given its distinctive characteristics of teamwork, goals interdependence and effort coordination, research team members make a powerful and appealing sample group to deepen the research in this field. Therefore, the sample of this study is made up of 639 participants, all researchers from research institutions, of both genders and different ages, with high academic qualifications (52.1% have a PhD and 33.4% have a master degree). The Organizational Cooperation Questionnaire (ORCOQ), proposed by dos Santos, Figueiredo, and Pais [1], has been applied to workers from several sectors, in order to understand its factorial structure. In the present sample of research team members, exploratory factor analysis has revealed good psychometric properties, with a 3-factor solution, responsible for 59.53% of the total variance. This structure is similar to the structure obtained by dos Santos, Figueiredo and Pais [1]. The first factor explains 26.28%, the second 18.92%, and the third 14.33% of the total variance. The first is made up of a set of 13 items, and is named Principles of Cooperative Relationship (alpha=.920). The second is made up of 7 items and is called Formal cooperation (alpha=.894). Finally, the third is made up of 4 items and is named Cooperation focused on organizational mission (alpha=.876). The present study will broaden the scope of research in cooperation providing a suitable instrument to measure it in this specific sector of activity.