Anthony Klotz: "Our Better Nature: How Biophilic Interventions Influence Employee Behavior"

Management scholars have recently theorized and shown how contact with nature can promote employee well-being and subsequent task performance, citizenship, and creativity. In doing so, the organizational literature has focused on nature’s effects on positive outcomes for workers, overlooking the role it may play in shaping negative outcomes. This oversight is meaningful given research in adjacent fields indicating that nature-based (i.e., biophilic) interventions can curb engagement in deviant behavior. Yet whether such interventions, amid people’s workdays, will likewise have meaningful effects on their negative behavior at work, and the pathways via which these effects might occur, are unclear. In this paper, we draw on the theory of biophilic work design to hypothesize that nature-based interventions will reduce workplace incivility, via affective, cognitive, prosocial, and physical pathways. We test these predictions in an online experiment and a field experiment.

Dr. Anthony Klotz is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at UCL School of Management in London. Anthony’s research focuses on understanding employees’ relationship with work, through the lenses of resignations, citizenship behavior, and biophilic design. His research has been published in top management journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly, and he has written for Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Anthony is currently an Associate Editor at Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Anthony is also known for having coined the phrase “The Great Resignation” in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in May 2021. He has discussed the current state and future of work with media outlets including CNN, The Today Show, the New York Times, and the BBC, and with executive teams at numerous Fortune 100 organizations.