Zhang and colleagues link specific work activities and energy levels; their findings may be useful to designers developing at-work break/refreshment zones, for example. The Zhang-lead team found “a time allocation effect, such that for a given period of the workday (i.e., the morning or the afternoon), the greater the proportion of time a knowledge worker spent in meetings relative to individual work, the less this person engaged in microbreak activities for replenishment during that period. The reduction in microbreak activities, in turn, harmed energy. We also found a pressure complementarity effect in the morning (though not in the afternoon), such that when a meeting involved low pressure in the presence of high-pressure individual work or vice versa, when a meeting involved high pressure in the presence of low-pressure individual work, such complementarity benefited energy.”
Chen Zhang, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Zhaodong Qui. “Meetings and Individual Work During the Workday: Examining Their Interdependent Impact on Knowledge Workers’ Energy.” Journal of Applied Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001091
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.