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Clutter in the home negatively influences a person's well-being, but this tendency has not been investigated in workplace settings. The present study addressed whether office clutter impacted work-place well-being (job satisfaction, job tension, employee engagement, burnout, and occupational stress) using a crowd-sourced sample of U.S. adults (n = 290; 177 male, 113 female) employed full-time in office and/or home settings. It was hypothesized that office clutter would negatively impact job satisfaction and employee engagement, positively impact emotional exhaustion and occupational stress, and job-related tension would moderate the relationship between office clutter and job satisfaction. Multiple hierarchical linear regressions and a moderated hierarchical regression analyzed the data and tested the hypotheses. Results showed that office clutter did predict emotional exhaustion and stress.
KEY WORDS: office clutter, work-place well-being, crowd source adults
Clutter's impact is a research topic of interest to psychologists (cf, Crum & Ferrari, 2019a; Crum & Ferrari, 2019b: Roster, Ferrari, & Jurkat, 2016), extending into the corporate world (Roster & Ferrari, 2020). In fact, organizations initiated "clean desk policies" of paper and digitalizing data (Parviainen, Tihinen, Kääriäinen, & Teppola, 2017). Clutter in the workplace seems innocuous but may impact employee performance. The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO, 2009) claimed that about 27% of adults feel disorganized while at work and believe they would save over an hour per day in productivity if their workspaces were more organized. The Kelton Research for Office Max found that over half of workers (53%) believed that their motivation was negatively affected by their own workspace disorganization. A fifth of the participants also stated that clutter impacted their relationships with peers and coworkers, and 53% admitted that they have negative impressions of their coworkers with messy workspaces. Despite these statistics and the potential consequences of office clutter, few published psychological studies supported or challenged survey results.
Clutter is defined as the over-accumulation of material items that create a chaotic and disorderly space (Roster, Ferrari, & Jurkat, 2016), and may include possessions that are either commonly used or unused. Clutter, however, is not to be confused with hoarding, a psychological disorder recognized by the DSM-5 and ICD-10. Hoarding is an obsessive-compulsive disorder that involves over-accumulation of the same types of items, often of little or no worth to...