How Employees Assess the Quality of Physical Work Settings

Abstract

Physical conditions of work remain a hidden dimension of organizational life (Hall, 1966). Historically, physical conditions of work have received relatively little notice in the study of organizations, at least since the Hawthorne Studies appeared to suggest that the manipulation of objective factors was less consequential than the impact of social relations in work settings. Organizational ecology (Steele, 1986), the patterns of reciprocal relationships between individuals and features of their work surroundings, is not well understood. Contemporary interest in the influence of physical settings is on the rise. This is partly because sick are common and cause employees to experience chronic fatigue, headaches, dizziness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and Legionnaires' disease. Sick buildings can injure and kill. The quality of work environments also influences employee morale, productivity, and turnover. It is important for employees and organizational administrators who have to deal with the productive and legal consequences of the neglect of this issue. Recently, Charles Goodsell (1990) categorized physical settings issues as administrative ethnography and identified this as an important emerging area of research in the field of public administration. More research in this area would contribute to greater understanding of the dynamics of administrative life, the influences of organizational cultures within bureaucracy, and the development of crucial work attitudes. What follows is an empirical test of a theory of how person-environment relations work in organizations. The study explores how workers make sense of their surroundings and relates that sense to overall job satisfaction. This research tests two hypotheses. First, employees judge physical work factors based on assessments of a work setting's adequacy, arrangement, and symbolic features and of how much power they feel they have concerning their design and use. Second, employee evaluations of these elements result in an overall