Abstract
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we predict and find that bad weather increases individual productivity and that it does so by eliminating potential cognitive distractions resulting from good weather. When the weather is bad, individuals appear to focus more on their work than on alternate outdoor activities. We investigate the proposed relationship between worse weather and higher productivity through 4 studies: (a) field data on employees' productivity from a bank in Japan, (b) 2 studies from an online labor market in the United States, and (c) a laboratory experiment. Our findings suggest that worker productivity is higher on bad-, rather than good-, weather days and that cognitive distractions associated with good weather may explain the relationship. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our research.
Highlights
The determinants of work productivity are often understood to be within an organization’s control
These survey results indicate that people believe that weather will impact their productivity and that bad weather conditions in particular will be detrimental to productivity
We propose that a factor that is cognitive rather than affective may come into play in explaining the role of weather in productivity at work, namely the salience of outside options
Summary
The determinants of work productivity are often understood to be within an organization’s control. Organizations employ a variety of strategies to boost worker productivity These strategies include workflow designs to avoid system bottlenecks as well as incentives and varying task assignments to increase workers’ motivation and capitalize on their abilities (e.g., KC and Terwiesch, 2009; Schultz, Schoenherr, and Nembhard, 2010; Staats and Gino, 2012). These strategies often fail to account for powerful exogenous factors, such as weather conditions on a given day, that may influence worker productivity. We conducted a randomized experiment in the controlled setting of a laboratory using a similar data-entry task to identify a mechanism by which weather conditions influence productivity. We operationalized the completion time for individual data-entry tasks as our key dependent variable
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call