Office worker performance and satisfaction: the effects of office noise and individual characteristics
| dc.contributor.author | Ng, Cheuk Fan | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Gifford, Robert | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-03-27T21:11:48Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-03-27T21:11:48Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1989 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Psychology | |
| dc.description.abstract | The effects of office noise on employees' satisfaction and performance are investigated in three studies, with attention given to individuals' characteristics that may modify these effects. 128 office workers completed questionnaires about themselves, their jobs, the physical features of and the perceptions of their offices. The information was used to test a causal model of employees' response to the work environment. To most respondents, particularly those in open-plan offices, their offices were too noisy and not private enough. They were distracted from work, had difficulty hearing others, and were irritated by noise. Noises made by office machines and telephones, and co-workers' conversations were distracting. The results of a path analysis were that job level affected office openness directly, office openness affected both aural distraction and conversational privacy directly, which in turn affected overall privacy. Finally, overall privacy affected satisfaction with the environment directly. Females and younger employees had less conversational privacy. Females also had more aural distractions. Unfortunately, the hypothesized model was rejected. There may be direct effects of (1) aural distraction on satisfaction, (2) job level on aural distraction, and (3) aural distraction on conversational privacy. Coworkers' conversations are a prime noise source, but their effects on office task performance have rarely been examined. In Experiment 1, the hypotheses that background conversations impaired performance, and that screeners performed better than non-screeners in the presence of irrelevant information and especially in high information rate settings are tested. A between-subjects factorial design (information rate, information relevance, stimulus screening) with a single control group was used. Sixty-one clerks performed simulated office tasks for 30-45 minutes. Subjects in the experimental groups heard a tape recording of a conversation. The conversations differed in information rate and information relevance. Subjects' stimulus screening abilities were measured with Mehrabian's Scale. The speed and the accuracy of each task were measured. Background conversation did not lower the performance of the tasks. Spelling speed was lower when the information was irrelevant. Spelling accuracy was affected by information rate, information relevance, and stimulus screening in combination. As predicted, non-screeners worked significantly more slowly overall and on spelling when irrelevant information was present. However, screeners were no faster than non-screeners in high information rate settings. Perhaps speech rate does not validly measure information rate. Consistent with previous findings, the background conversation made working less enjoyable and was fairly distracting. Individual differences in noise response must be considered, and yet have received little attention. In Experiment 2, the hypotheses that individuals perform best at the most preferred sound level and that personality may modify such relationship were tested. A within-subject repeated measures design was used. Twenty-eight data-entry operators' productivity (speed and accuracy) was measured in five one-hour sessions in which background office noise was presented at five levels. In the first session, each subject completed a sound sensitivity and an introversion-extraversion scale, and selected her most preferred sound level. All subjects preferred the lower noise levels (48-56 dBA). Extraverts chose higher sound levels than did introverts. Only the operators with more extreme scores on the introversion-extraversion rating scale produced most at the most preferred sound level, as predicted. Noise sensitive operators were clearly more accurate than were less-sensitive operators. Difficulty in recruiting office workers resulted in small samples. The use of single items as measures of some variables in the survey, questionable operationalization of information rate in Experiment 1, and the inability to reduce ambient noise to much lower levels in Experiment 2 pose some limitations to these findings. Compared with many laboratory experiments in which meaningless noise, unfamiliar tasks, and unrealistically high noise levels are used, the experiments have greater external validity. | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/21697 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | |
| dc.title | Office worker performance and satisfaction: the effects of office noise and individual characteristics | |
| dc.type | Thesis |