ABSTRACT
The intent, form, and functionality of an organization’s physical work environment can enhance or constrain the level of thriving experienced by its employees. Thriving is the joint experience of learning and vitality at work. Thriving is not a fixed state or condition. Instead, people achieve it through active and ongoing cognitive and social behaviours that are framed by overarching prosocial or virtuous organizational messages. The physical work environment transmits organizational messages to people through material, aesthetic, and symbolic means, or affordances, that offer possibilities for (inter)action within time and space. In our chapter, we explore four types of affordances embedded in the physical environment: (1) affective affordances, (2) identity affordances, (3) social affordances, and (4) knowledge-sharing/creation affordances. These four types of affordances provide opportunities for people to act in ways that enhance their experience of thriving. We draw from an interdisciplinary body of literature from the fields of management and organizational studies, design and the built environment, and public health. Although there are many paths to experiencing a sense of thriving at work, we argue that affordances in the physical work environment can provide people with requisite levels of agency that allow them to control how they engage with others and their material surroundings in order to continuously experience thriving.
