benign neglect

Consider the office cubicle. Some people pile their desks with everything
from old newspapers to unwashed
mugs; others are fastidiously tidy. (I
fluctuate.) I’m not saying that people
with messy desks are more productive,
although there’s some evidence that
they are; I’m just saying that if your colleague is a messy-desker then he or she
shouldbeallowedtogetonwithit.
Support for this position comes from
a study conducted by two psychologists,
Alex Haslam and Craig Knight. A few
years ago they set up simple office
spaces in which they asked experimental subjects to spend an hour doing
administrativetasks.
Messrs Haslam and Knight wanted to
understand what made people productive and happy, and they tested four
arrangements in a randomised trial.
One was minimalist: chair, desk, bare
walls. A second was softened with tasteful prints and some greenery. Workers
werehappierthere,andgotmoredone.
The kicker comes with the third and
fourth arrangements. In each case,
workers were invited to rearrange the
pictures and pot-plants as they wished
before settling down to work. But while
some were then left to their labours,
others were second-guessed by an
experimenterwhosteppedinandfound
apretexttorearrangeeverything.
This, unsurprisingly, drove people
mad. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted. Empowering people to lay out their own space led to happier,moreproductiveworkers.Stripped
of that freedom, everyone’s productivityfellandsomefeltquiteill