Published on: May 7, 2025 at 7:33 pm
Most people personalize their workspaces with photographs, trinkets, or diplomas, even when faced with limited space or rules that prohibit such behavior. While it might seem to be a trivial matter, it can be important, because it can affect employees’ motivation, team productivity, and organizational culture.
Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said that a key finding from an Academy of Management Journal article written by her and Gregory Laurence of the University of Michigan-Flint was that not all personalization of people’s office or cubicle is meant for public consumption.
“There are some things that you might have that you put in a place where it’s meant for you, not for others, and those things can be really important to you,” Byron said. “For example, a lot of our study participants talked about things that only they could see, or maybe other people could see them, but they wouldn’t know how to interpret them—maybe it was a rock that someone picked up on a hiking trip, and so the rock would not have any meaning for someone else, but it was really meaningful to them because it reminded them of their important goals.
“Some people might say about their office decorations, ‘It reminds me of how important time that I spend with my family is,’ or ‘It reminds me of why I do this work,’” she said. “Some people talked about other things that were personal inspirations for them, something that represented an ideal for their work output that they were not at yet.
“If they’re a designer, maybe they had a photo of a piece of design that they thought was stellar, and they thought, ‘My design work is not at that level yet, but that’s what I aspire to,’ so it was all about reminding them of their goals, either their personal goals or their professional goals, or some intersection of their personal and professional goals.”
