Healthy and Inclusive Workplaces

My research covers changing physical and technological work environments, with a special focus on how vulnerable workers react to changes. 

The use and perception of organizational space post-Covid-19 has changed extensively. Some organizations implemented hybrid working, some have fully switched to remote work, and in some cases, organizations prefer that their employees are back to work in the office. To allow for more evidence-based insights into knowledge workers’ modern workspaces, this thesis advances our understanding of the holistic impact of the work location, including cellular versus activity-based flexible office (A-FO) concepts and remote work. By using data from objective human resource (HR) records, an online experiment, and widely collected secondary data, the thesis seeks to understand how spatial concepts and boundary conditions like employee gender, tenure, childcare responsibilities, and organizational settings affect employee absenteeism, presenteeism, social relationships, and productivity.

Overall, the findings highlight that organizations should pay attention to behavioral outcomes as well as employee subgroups’ needs and the circumstances in which workspace transitions happen. The unique insights can inform practitioners on how to craft well-being-promoting and productive workspaces.

Human Resource Management

Are the differences not that different? Exploring an age perspective on employee preferences using an employer review platform

https://doi.org/10.1177/23970022251337642 

Due to demographic changes and their impact on the labor market, attracting and retaining older employees plays a decisive role in organizations’ ability to maintain their workforce. This requires organizations to publicly display a work environment that fits the particular preferences of this target group. Drawing on lifespan theories, we examine how the link between employee preferences and employees’ likelihood of recommending their employer to others varies by age. To address the lack of integration between the literatures on workforce aging and employer branding, we take an empirical approach analyzing 292,429 numeric and unedited text-based employee reviews from an employer rating platform. Our findings reveal that relationship-building, fair and appreciative supervisor behavior, positive interactions with older colleagues, and location-flexible, efficient work conditions play pivotal roles in shaping older employees’ likelihood of recommending their employer. Although these age-related interaction effects are significant, they remain small, suggesting broadly compatible preferences between older and younger employees. We also demonstrate that these findings are robust across gender and income groups. Finally, we provide tangible recommendations for the incorporation of lifespan theories in the employer branding context and highlight the value of using platform data for future research.

Space Management

A quasi-experimental exploration of activity-based flexible office design and demographic differences in employee absenteeism

https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231163549

This study examines whether transitioning from cellular offices to an activity-based flexible office (A-FO) impacts employee absenteeism over time. Based on privacy theory, we hypothesized that changing from cell offices to an A-FO setting would lead to increased employee absenteeism. We further assumed that longer-tenured and female employees would experience greater difficulty with the transition, leading to more absenteeism among these groups. Using a sample of 2,017 white-collar workers tracked over eight years, we quasi-experimentally investigated if absenteeism in the group with the office design intervention (1,035 individuals) differed from the control group (982 individuals). In the difference-in-difference (DiD) framework, nested negative binomial regression showed no difference in absenteeism between the intervention and control groups. However, a three-way interaction revealed that long-term employees showed higher absenteeism when switching to an A-FO. We discuss our contributions and the implications for corporate leadership, human resources, and change management.

Making it yours: Room crafting for adaptive workspace design 

Full manuscript

How's your new office? The impact of activity-based offices on task accomplishment

Full manuscript 

Technology Perceptions

Can welfare states buffer technostress? Income and technostress in the context of various OECD countries

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295229

Many workers are experiencing the downsides of being exposed to an overload of information and communication technology (ICT), highlighting the need for resources to cope with the resulting technostress. This article offers a novel cross-level perspective on technostress by examining how the context of the welfare state influences the relationship between income and technostress. Showing that individuals with higher income experience less technostress, this study argues that the welfare state represents an additional coping resource, in particular in the form of unemployment benefits. Since unemployment benefits insure income earners in the case of job loss, the negative effect of income on technostress should increase with higher levels of unemployment generosity. In line with these expectations, empirical results based on original survey data collected in collaboration with the OECD show that the impact of income on technostress varies across welfare state contexts. Implications for public health and policymakers are being discussed. 

Are you afrAId? Understanding employees' attitudes toward AI 

Accepted to AOM 2025, further data collection in progress

Organizations increasingly leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate complex and dynamic operational landscapes. Anchored in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study explores how individual, team, and organizational-level factors influence employees’ attitudes toward AI at work. We conducted an intervention study with 67 employees in a European industrial company to evaluate the impact of introducing a generative AI chatbot. The study employed a pre-post design, measuring changes in employee attitudes before the chatbot’s introduction and one month after. Our analytical approach distinguishes between cognitive and affective dimensions of AI attitudes, including perceptions of utility, anxiety, and insecurity, with a focus on how competence, relatedness, and autonomy drive these perceptions. Our findings reveal that introducing a generative AI tool significantly improved employees’ attitudes toward AI, particularly when supported by individual AI competence and autonomy through participation in the AI development process. These enhanced AI attitudes in turn led to higher employee performance. Regarding relatedness, team interdependence did not alter AI attitudes. This study enhances the multilevel understanding of AI adoption processes and offers actionable insights for optimizing chatbot implementations.