Assessing impact of the built environment on academic research productivity

This dissertation examines the nature of academic work in an Australian context, the impact indoor environments pose on such work, and how differences in perceptions of indoor environments from other professional university staff have implications for built environments they typically co-habit. Despite interest in sustainable building design and promise for human benefit, there remains limited understanding as to antecedents of influence such workspace environments pose to professional occupants. Growth in Australian university campus developments have encouragingly built upon the moral imperative to create buildings with reduced environmental impact for the benefit of the natural environment, the institution and its students. However, without greater understanding of how new, green-rated, high-performance office environments influence occupant well-being and work performance, benefits will be at best confined to lessened resource use and positive publicity, with potentially hazardous unintended consequences in the form of under-utilised buildings and reduced academic productivity. Adopting and adapting a combination of user-centred theory (Vischer, 2008a), two factor theory (Herzberg, 1966), and self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2008), this research focuses on academic research staff as 'users' of their workplaces, and creates a new theoretical framework to develop hypotheses about their intrinsic motivation to be productive, and their perceptions of their own productivity within their work environment. Hence, this body of research reviews the literature on university buildings, indoor environmental quality variables as they relate to academic productivity, and academic work in Australian conditions to answer research questions on how the workplace impacts academic productivity. Using an established occupant survey method (Building in Use Studies, BUS methodology) and census-level research output data used to establish university rankings nationally (Excellence in Research Australia, ERA) in a case study of an urban university in Melbourne, Australia, both their perceived and objective measures of research productivity are compared and contrasted. This study also presents differences between co-located academic and non-academic professional staff in their perceptions of indoor quality conditions and suggests significant key indoor environmental criteria between the professions, as well as IEQ factors for optimal research outputs as perceived by academic staff. Analysis of longitudinal objective productivity data of a select cohort of academic staff (n=262, 10 years), indicates consistency with their perceptions but no significant improvement from changing from a conventional office building to a new, green-rated office building, despite the remaining university staff (n=1260, 10 years) increasing their productivity over the same period. Results imply that despite perceived importance of air quality, and noise and interruption control for research productivity, poor academic productivity is not necessarily remedied by provision of alternative office environments. Further research is required on optimal academic workplace settings to refine the confounding factors associated with academic work and the role the built environment has on both subjective and objective measures of academic research productivity, especially as the nature of academic work and the role and locale of the workplace continue to adapt to growing external pressures.