An Exploratory Study on the Organisational Climate of Krishi Vigyan Kendras of Meghalaya

Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) serve as a frontline extension system and as knowledge resource centres of agricultural technologies for supporting farmers in improving their agricultural production and livelihood. They are vital in contributing to agricultural development in the county through technology assessment, refinement and diffusion. They also play a significant part in the development of the capacity of human resources in the grass root agricultural sector. Owing to the importance of these organisations, this study was conducted in five KVKs of Meghalaya to explore the work environment of the KVK workforce through studying the Organisational Climate (OC). Organisational Climate is the shared perception of the people working in the organisation about their organisation. It can be considered as the team spirit in any organisation and is important to the effectiveness of those organisations, be it big or small, private or public and profit or non-profit. The tool employed for the study was the Organisation Climate Questionnaire (OCQ) developed by Furham and Goodstein (1997). It was found that all the dimensions of organisational climate were having relatively high scores except in the case of Career Development, Teamwork and Support, Relationship and Reward System in some of the KVKs. These aspects of organisational climate had a relatively lower OCQ score and indicated that there was a need for change to address these problems in the organisations. Proper measures like progressive career development opportunities and fair promotions, recruitment of motivated and qualified support staffs, a more comprehensive orientation programme with efforts on professional relationship building strategies and proper reward incentives (financial and non-financial) may be a remedial measure to these ailing organisation climate aspects in these organisations.