Photo by Laura Davidson on Unsplash
In this study, I explored how giving an individual or group control of their workspace design influences task performance and group cohesiveness. I wanted to to know if giving employees and working groups control over their environment would improve group performance, organizational effectiveness, and therefore, a company's bottom line.
Even though I didn't find changes in performance, the results suggested that high levels of both individual and group control may be necessary to generate cohesiveness and facilitate the creation of consensus within the group.
I organized and performed all the research on this project. I also ran the raw data through various tests in SPSS to generate the results, while my thesis advisor, Zachary L. Simmons, provided feedback on my experiment design and final paper.
Experiment Design
First, I wanted to know whether giving participants the chance to design their environment would have any impact on participants. That meant I needed to assign each group to one of two scenarios, or "conditions" - low and high environmental control.
Second, I needed to understand if there was difference between giving each participant the chance to design their own workspace and the group designing their collective workspace together. This required splitting each control condition into two more - individual and group control - resulting in four total conditions.
1. Low Individual/Low Group: The room is already set up for the group, they are told to discuss their favorite movie instead.
2. High Individual/Low Group: Each participant places one desk, one chair, and one décor item
3. Low Individual/High Group: The group designs the room with tables, chairs, and décor items by consensus
4. High Individual/High Group: Group consensus on tables and chairs, each participant places one décor item
Next, I needed some kind of task that could test how individual participants performed, but also the group as a whole. I eventually landed on the "Winter Survival Task," where I gave participants a hypothetical scenario in which their plane has crash landed in Minnesota in the winter and they must rank 15 items based on their importance for survival. I graded this task by looking a the difference between participants' ranking and and professional rankings by Mark Wanvig, an instructor in the survival training of the 101st Division in the U.S. Army
The experiment ended with a questionnaire testing participants' perceptions of spatial autonomy (another phrase for environmental control), environmental satisfaction, cohesion, and individual and group performance. I included this because I wanted to see if participants noticed the effects, if any, the environment had on them.
I put all these elements together to develop this experiment design:
Hypothesis 1:
Groups with high individual and high group environmental control will perform the best.
Hypothesis 2:
Groups with high individual and high group environmental control will be the most cohesive.
Conducting the Experiment
It wasn't easy finding the right place to hold the experiment when the psychology department only offered tiny basement rooms with nailed down furniture. I needed to reserve a room for 3 hours every evening for a week. My advisor, Dr. Simmons, recommended I talk to the event coordination staff on campus. Despite all the regular classrooms being booked, they offered me one of the rooms on the second floor of the gym. It was a regular-sized classroom with two walls of floor to ceiling windows and the other two had whiteboards. What's more: all the furniture had wheels!
Does environmental control make a difference?
After grading all the Winter Survival Tasks and inputting all the questionnaire responses, it was time to see whether my months of work produced worthwhile results. One by one, I ran the results through various tests in the SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to test my hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1:
Did individual and group control impact individual or group task scores?
No.
Hypothesis 2:
Did individual and group control affect perceived group cohesion?
No.
At this point, I started to get worried. Both of my predictions were wrong. All the other questionnaires weren't showing any significant difference between the 4 conditions. The only exception was spatial autonomy, which showed that participants did feel like that had more control in their environment if they were in a condition with high individual or group environmental control. However, there was one more test to run.
I wanted to compare how participants performed in the Winter Survival Task on their own compared to how their group performed. To calculate this, I looked at the difference between her/his individual score and the group score, or:
| Individual Score - Group Score| = Score Change
New Hypothesis:
Did individual and group control affect whether participants
changed their minds about ranking during the group discussion?
YES!
F(1,31) = 12.09, p=.002*
As I searched the literature to find why environmental control would impact score change, I found the Social Identity Approach. It proposes that the identity we most relate to will impact our behavior the most. When people identify more with a particular social identity (like being in a group), it has a number of effects:
- More trusting of one another
- Communication increases
- Have more of an influence on others
- More willing to cooperate
Maybe what was happening there is that when groups designed a space together, they identified more with their group, making them more convincing to and more easily convinced by their fellow group members.
But to get that effect, everyone needs to participate in that styling. That can be seen in the score change results of the high individual/high group control condition where the groups placed the tables and chairs together and each participant placed their own décor item.
* For those who are familiar with statistical analyses, you can find the complete results in the index.
Conclusion
In the end, my hypotheses were not supported. There were no significant effects of individual and group environmental control on individual performance, group performance, or group cohesion.
However, there was a notable significance in score change which suggested that giving a group and its members control over the design of their workspace positively impacts how they function together. This result has real world implications in legitimizing participatory design and the need for flexible workspaces.
It should be noted that these results do not mean that environmental control has no impact of individual and group performance. I had a small sample size with only 35 participants divided into 10 groups. Moreover, these groups were artificial working groups who were only coming together for the short time the experiment lasted, not working alongside one another for 40 hour work weeks.
Future studies may bring more clarity to the relationships between these variables by having a larger sample size or evaluating the outcomes after providing varying levels of environmental control to established work groups.
Index
