A Handbook of Theories on Designing Alignment Between People and the Office Environment

Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek, Vitalija Danivska, Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek, Vitalija Danivska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000416565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Although workplace design and management are gaining more and more attention from modern organizations, workplace research is still very fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia. There are several books on the market related to workplaces, facility management (FM), and corporate real estate management (CREM) disciplines, but few open up a theoretical and practical discussion across multiple theories from different fields of studies. Therefore, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplace management and effects of workplace design on employees has been or could be studied. A lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines, and sadly, many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Therefore, this new book series is started by associate professor Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and postdoc researcher Vitalija Danivska (Aalto University, Finland) as editors, published by Routledge. It is titled 'Transdisciplinary Workplace Research and Management' because it bundles important research insights from different disciplinary fields and shows its relevance for both academic workplace research and workplace management in practice. The books will address the complexity of the transdisciplinary angle necessary to solve ongoing workplace-related issues in practice, such as knowledge worker productivity, office use, and more strategic workplace management. In addition, the editors work towards further collaboration and integration of the necessary disciplines for further development of the workplace field in research and in practice. This book series is relevant for workplace experts both in academia and industry.

This first book in the series focuses on the employee as a user of the work environment. The 21 theories discussed and applied to workplace design in this book address people's ability to do their job and thrive in relation to the office workplace. Some focus more on explaining why people behave the way they do (the psychosocial environment), while others take the physical and/or digital workplace quality as a starting point to explain employee outcomes such as health, satisfaction, and performance. They all explain different aspects for achieving employee-workplace alignment (EWA) and thereby ensuring employee thriving. The final chapter describes a first step towards integrating these theories into an overall interdisciplinary framework for eventually developing a grand EWA theory.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003128830, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1
GATHERING THEORIES TO EXPLAIN EMPLOYEE-WORKPLACE ALIGNMENT FROM AN INTERDISCIPLINARY VIEWPOINT

Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek* and Vitalija Danivska

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

DOI: 10.1201/9781003128830-1

1 Introduction

In a way, the field of office workplace management was born with the first introduction in society of dedicated buildings to perform work away from the home environment. Nonetheless, for centuries the attention on physical workplaces was purely focused on providing shelter from outside forces, without thinking much of how this work environment fitted people’s needs, preferences and activities. Much later, large companies started to assign the task of workplace management to dedicated managers, and it became a profession. However, the background training of these early workplace managers was often not in real estate but in the core business of the company, and their focus remained on efficiency and timely provision of square metres, rather than on optimally supporting the people that had to use the office. During the ’90s of the 20th century this changed, when workplace management started to become a topic of academic and practice-based research. It became clear that corporate real estate management (CREM), facility management (FM) and other workplace-related management professions needed to improve their ad hoc and operational way of working towards a more strategic and context-specific approach. Also, real estate programs started to appear at universities on bachelor and master levels, although for a long time these also focused mostly on the financial management of real estate, instead of the real estate users (Epley, 2006). Training on the users’ experience of work environments was ‘confined’ to different, much older traditions such as psychology and sociology. It was not until the past decade that knowledge from such disciplines started to slowly penetrate the workplace management profession, partly by increased joint approaches to the work environment with human resource management (HRM) and other departments, as well as interdisciplinary research projects by academics.

Since the ’90s, much has been written on workplace design and management and how this supports or hinders employees, by researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds. Both field studies and experiments and controlled laboratory experiments have shown that people are affected by their work environment in many ways (see Appel-Meulenbroek, Clippard, & Pfnür, 2018 for a scoping review of evidence), and thus it is important to align the workplace to the employee’s needs. Also, more and more proof came forward that designing a more optimal fit between employees and their work environment could increase not only their comfort and satisfaction, but also task performance, health and commitment to the company.

So far, the term alignment in the context of workplace design and management research has been used largely on the strategic organisational and corporate real estate portfolio level (e.g. Heywood & Arkesteijn, 2017), departing from theories in the field of strategic management. Alignment between a person and the environment on the individual level is generally called ‘fit’, referring to person–environment (PE) fit theories (see Chapter 2) stemming from psychology. But judging from the definition of alignment in the MacMillan dictionary, “the organization of activities or systems so that they match or fit well together”, the terms alignment and fit are closely related. For this book, the editors have therefore chosen for the term employee-workplace alignment (EWA) instead of PE-fit, to emphasise the focus on the physical work environment, thus following other recent works in the workplace field that have done so (e.g. Roskams & Haynes, 2019). As Roskams and Haynes (p. 282) put it, “a workplace environment which is perfectly aligned to the occupants is one which is free of demands and abundant in resources.” The importance of PE-fit, generally focused on the psychosocial work environment, has been proven across many different contexts, by researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds. Although only a few studies explicitly apply PE-fit theory to the physical work environment (e.g. Hoendervanger, Van Yperen, Mobach, & Albers, 2019), it would seem that EWA is thus also important.

For sure, nowadays many organisations and their workplace managers are looking for evidence on how to align office design solutions to their workforce more optimally, so they believe in the importance of EWA. Their end goal is happy, healthy, productive and engaged employees; also called thriving (Kleine, Rudolph, & Zacher, 2019). But here they often run into problems. Workplace research is quite fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia, each having their own focus on parts of the mechanisms behind the P–E fit equation (Appel-Meulenbroek et al., 2018). Because of this fragmentation, a lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines and many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Psychologists present their workplace-related research at psychology conferences and in psychology journals and business magazines, while real estate academics stick to real estate conferences and outlets, ergono-mists to the ergonomic counterparts, etc. This causes a lack of integration of knowledge into an overall theoretical framework.

1.1 A complex problem

Traditionally, an academic discipline is an area of study with its own vocabulary, theories, strategy and techniques for replication and validity (Donald, 2002). However, workplace design is typically a field of ‘complex problems’ that needs input from many different disciplines. Like other complex systems, a key property is “that the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts” (Bernstein, 2015). Looking from one discipline only will never capture the whole picture. For example, Zhang and Shen (2015) showed that when dealing with complex, real-world problems that require knowledge from multiple disciplines, students may suffer from isolated knowledge and discipline-specific reasoning and problem-solving. The same is likely to be true for more advanced researchers. Because of the fragmentation of knowledge, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplaces are studied, nor can they oversee all the theories and methodologies that are used by other disciplines on the same complex problem.

An optimal EWA can probably even be considered a so-called wicked problem, because as Kreuter, De Rosa, Howze, and Baldwin (2004) describe wicked problems, they are difficult to pin down and influenced by a constellation of complex social and political factors that change over time. Especially regarding environmental health, they sum up four characteristics that make problems wicked, and all four clearly apply to reaching EWA:

1. The nature of the problem is viewed differently depending on the perspectives and biases of those with a stake in the problem.
2. Multiple stakeholders are involved which disagree about the problem and the optimal solution.
3. It is unclear when the problem is actually solved.
4. What works in one context does not necessarily work in another similar context.

While several other books and journals are dedicated to workplace design and management, only very few open up a theoretical discussion across multiple theories from different disciplines. Also, no overall interdisciplinary framework ties such theories together and as such gives a more holistic view of improving EWA. Therefore, closing that research gap is the goal of this book. It will provide the necessary insights into the (potential) application of 21 theories from multiple disciplinary fields to optimise alignment between people and their work environment. Each chapter will address one theory (or a set of related theories) in the context of better, human-focused workplace design. It will explain the theory’s assumptions, its implications for the work-place field, relevant research methodologies to study this further, and the theory’s relevance for workplace managers in practice. To start an interdisciplinary integration of all these theoretical assumptions, the last chapter ties the 21 theories together into an overall interdisciplinary framework as a first step towards a grand theory on EWA. The setup of this framework is based on an empirical concept-mapping study, involving the authors of the different chapters as respondents (see Chapter 23 for more details).

The next sections of this introductory chapter will now explain the concept of inter- and transdisciplinarity, plus the different disciplines that are represented in some way in this book. It also discusses the logic of the chapter order in the book. This is followed by a brief discussion of terminologies, in order to prevent cross-disciplinary confusions on terms. First, this regards the differences between terms like a theory, model or framework. Then, terms from the work-place field itself are treated (e.g. workplace versus workspace), discussing their meaning and use. Last, the setup of the series and the broad disciplinary background of the 41 authors of this first volume are described.

2 Transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinarity is proven to be effective in fields like architecture, where social, technical, and economic developments interact with elements of value and culture (Klein, 2004). Therefore, this is the essence of this book series and its books. It is a relatively young term, first coined by the Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) (Nicolescu, 2006). Piaget (1972, as cited in Nicolescu, 2006) described transdisciplinarity:

Finally, we hope to see succeeding to the stage of interdisciplinary relations a superior stage, which should be ‘transdisciplinary’, i.e. which will not be limited to recognize the interactions and or reciprocities between the specialized researches, but which will locate these links inside a total system without stable boundaries between the disciplines.

Many mark the 1970 OECD Conference ‘Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities’ and the contribution by Erich Jantsch (1972a, 1972b) as the birth of the discourse about transdisciplinarity (Jahn, Bergmann, & Keil, 2012). Another key date in its further development was the Charter of Transdisciplinarity (1994) which was adopted by the participants of the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity in Portugal (Nicolescu, 2014). Although there is no real consensus on an exact definition of transdisciplinarity, two aspects of the term are essential to capture it:

1. “Transdisciplinarity, more than a new discipline or super-discipli...