Navigating the Activity Based Working Environment – Relationships of Self-Leadership, Autonomy and Information Richness with Cognitive Stress and Performance

In activity-based working environment (ABWE) offices, employees are allowed increased autonomy and are expected to choose where, when, with whom, and to some degree with what, to work; in other words, employees are expected to self-lead to a higher degree and to coordinate and align with colleagues. Effects of these expectations on employees’ cognitive stress and performance are understudied. In the present study, Swedish ABWE workers (N = 416) are compared with workers in cell offices (N = 30) and landscape offices (N = 64), and relationships of self-leadership, information richness, and autonomy with cognitive stress and performance were examined using regression analysis. Results show no relationship between office type and outcomes. For cognitive stress, information richness had the largest negative relationship, followed by self-leadership: goal-setting and autonomy. For performance, self-leadership: goal-setting had the largest positive relationship, followed by information richness. This suggests that when organizational situations cannot be strongly structured – for example because the best work process is not known, or innovation or different collaboration constellations are needed – they need instead to be enriched so that employee orientation and coordination do not become too much of a burden on the individual employee, disrupting cognitive functioning and performance.