Hot spots or havens? Aligning workplace design with personal factors to enhance wellbeing

Aligning work tasks, workspace design and personal factors such as personality and national culture can lead to the development of workplaces where mood, worker performance, and wellbeing are optimized. In these spaces, workers’ preferences and expectations of where they will do a good job are consistent with environments provided. The purpose of the current study was to learn more about links between personality, national culture, experiences with workplace design, and perceptions of which work environments support working well. Extraverts select to do solo work requiring concentration in more communal environments than introverts and also seem more concerned about the comfort of visitors to their workstation than introverts. Extraverts also felt that they would do their current job well in more visually energizing environments than introverts. People in individualistic cultures feel that for them to do their current job well it was more important that they communicate with other people frequently than people from collectivist cultures. Insights drawn from this project can be used to inform the development of workplace environments that enhance mood, professional performance, and wellbeing.