External seminars

  Given the benefits of contact with nature, management scholars have recently explored how contact with nature can promote employee well-being and desirable behaviors like task performance, citizenship, and creativity. In doing so, the organizational literature has focused on nature’s effects on positive outcomes for workers, overlooking the role that it may play in shaping negative outcomes. This oversight is meaningful given research in adjacent fields indicating that nature-based (i.e., biophilic) interventions can curb people’s engagement in deviant behavior. Yet whether such interventions, amid people’s workdays, will likewise have meaningful effects on their negative behavior at work, and the pathways via which these effects might occur, are unclear. In this paper, we draw on the theory of biophilic work design to test the hypothesis that nature-based interventions will reduce workplace incivility. We also examine whether, as predicted by this theory, these effects are transmitted by affective, cognitive, prosocial, and physical mechanisms. The findings of a two-week field experiment involving 181 employees indicate that biophilic interventions positively affect all four mechanisms, but only one of them—physical health—is strong enough to transmit the effects of biophilic interventions to reduced workplace incivility. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.