THE IMPACT OF WORKPLACE AESTHETICS ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE, WELLBEING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COMFORT
Abstract
This study is carried out to determine if workplace aesthetics has any direct influence on employee performance in the higher education sector of Pakistan or a mediating influence through well-being and psychological comfort of employees. The nature of the study is quantitative. A cross-sectional survey was applied among teaching and non-teaching staff working at higher educational institutions based in Karachi, conveniently sampled. Four hundred nine (409) filled questionnaires were returned and used for data analysis by PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 4) to check reliability, validity, direct effects, and mediation effects, bootstrapping the model. Workplace aesthetics had significant positive effects on employees’ well-being as well as their psychological comfort, but its direct effect on employee performance was not significant; this path was rejected, while an indirect path via well-being was found significant, hence accepted because it showed that aesthetics strengthens well-being, which turns into enhanced performance. Workplace aesthetics should be treated as a lever (e.g., visual order, cleanliness, lighting quality, decluttering, restorative cues) by higher education administrators instead of attempting to extract immediate performance gains from workplace aesthetics. This is an aspect-specific study conducted in the context of higher education in an emerging economy that adds to the cross-contextual generalizability literature on mechanism-dominant links between workplace aesthetics and employee performance, with well-being as the key psychological pathway.
Keywords: Workplace Aesthetics; Employee Well-being; Psychological Comfort; Employee Performance.
