Air pollution has become a global public health hazard leading to debilitating effects on physical, mental, and emotional health. In addition, exposure to heat is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon as climate change becomes more intense. While the physical sensations associated with air pollution and extreme heat, such as difficulty in breathing, fatigue, or dizziness, are well known, what is less well known is the way that air pollution and heat exposure impact the way people work, particularly understanding the effects on leadership, employee well-being, and work-family conflict. I have, therefore, conducted extensive research which explores how environmental changes linked to climate change are impacting how people work. Here’s what the evidence tells us.
While previous research has been helpful in explaining many of the reasons that leaders might behave abusively towards employees, it largely assumed that being abusive to subordinates is explained by leader behaviour and styles, subordinate behaviours, or organisational culture. This is relatively disconnected from the broader physical environment in which the work occurs, an assumption which is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
An exploration of how air pollution influences leaders’ behaviours and effectiveness towards employees in India found that on days when the leaders experienced high air pollution, employees rated their leaders as more abusive and less engaged. My co-researchers and I found that this happened even in fully remote work arrangements, with leaders and workers located in different cities. This reveals that employees can be harmed by pollution they’re not even directly exposed to because the pollution experienced by their leaders causes them to behave poorly towards the people they manage.
Air pollution increases the strain on leaders, making them feel upset, nervous and irritable. They also experience physical discomfort, such as breathing difficulties, eye irritation or coughing. Because physical discomfort and negative emotions affect social functioning at work, not just health or performance, when air pollution is severe, some leaders lash out at subordinates or disengage from leadership responsibilities, even in remote work settings. Our research, therefore, has revealed the true organisational cost of air pollution.
Heat is another factor which impacts how leaders behave towards their employees. Research that I carried out examining the content of 210,886 Tweets about leaders found that workers judged their leaders to be more abusive when local temperatures were higher. In a second study, where we manipulated temperature to be either 70-75°F or 85-86°F in a laboratory, participants assigned to be leaders who were exposed to the high temperature behaved more abusively. Both studies indicate that when leaders are exposed to heat, the people working for them experience greater levels of abuse from their managers.
Workplace abuse differs from physical aggression in how it responds to heat. Excessive heat overwhelms emotional regulation, increasing abusive behaviour. Even at moderate heat levels, hostility comes into play, which leaders displace onto subordinates as abusive behaviour.
As temperatures rise due to climate change, leaders are more likely to become hostile and abusive—especially once heat exceeds comfortable levels—making climate change a meaningful driver of workplace mistreatment.
And it is not just in the workplace that we’re seeing behaviours impacted by environmental factors. A separate piece of research that I conducted with factory workers in Pakistan shows that air pollution experienced at work spills over into employees’ home lives, causing greater conflict at home. Employees exposed to air pollution feel too frazzled, stressed, or emotionally drained to engage with family.
In addition, a study of Tweets in Los Angeles found that on days with higher air pollution, people used more hostile language about family members and overall sentiment was slightly more negative.
Even when pollution was psychologically simulated via pollution imagery (vs. clean air imagery) during a US-based laboratory experiment, higher air pollution was associated with greater hostility. This hostility places a clear strain on family life.
It is clear from the research that air pollution causes strain similar to job stress, with consequences beyond the workplace. It makes employees sicker and more hostile, and those effects follow them home—disrupting family relationships through emotional strain and withdrawal.
Organisations need to be far more cognisant of the damaging effects of air pollution and higher temperatures. Climate change has direct interpersonal consequences at work and at home, not just physical or productivity effects. As climate change alters the physical context and conditions of people’s daily life, understanding how the physical environmental forces influence leader behaviour is essential for a comprehensive understanding of why leaders might be abusive towards the people who work for them. It is only by gaining a better understanding of the factors driving poor leadership behaviour, that organisations, and leaders themselves, can do more to prevent it.
Practical steps that organisations can take now
- Monitor and adjust work conditions during periods of high heat or high air pollution
- Allow remote work or schedule flexibility during heat waves or days of high air pollution
- Offer greater flexibility in work timings and location to avoid traveling during peak pollution times
- Create or update existing HR policies to allow employees to be able to avoid air pollution, for example by creating paid leave policies to make it easier for employees to take days off from work as air pollution sickness days
- Equip employees to better respond in days with high air pollution through training and resources, such as giving them masks and air purifiers and creating air pollution alerts, which are sent to employees to avoid or mitigate exposure to air pollution
- Provide leaders with resources that enable them to be more aware of their own well-being and their relationship with their employees, as a means to mitigate abusive and laissez-faire leadership resulting from air pollution or heat exposure
- Train leaders to recognise and regulate hostility induced by heat or air pollution.
By Dr Ussama Ahmad Khan, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School