The framework at the heart of the study is the Theory of Planned Behavior, or TPB, a model developed by social psychologists that has dominated behavioral research for decades. In its classic form, the theory proposes that a person’s intention to perform a behavior is driven by three factors: attitude, which captures how favorably the person evaluates the behavior; subjective norm, which reflects perceived social pressure from important others; and perceived behavioral control, which measures how easy or difficult the person believes the behavior to be. Intentions, in turn, are considered the most immediate psychological antecedents of actual behavior. Applied to energy conservation, the model asks whether employees who view saving energy as beneficial, feel encouraged by people whose opinions they value, and believe they have the resources and opportunity to act are more likely to intend to conserve.

While the TPB has been applied extensively to energy-saving behavior among university students, the authors identified a striking gap: comparatively little research has examined other university stakeholders, particularly faculty members and administrative staff. This matters because universities are large, energy-intensive organizations filled with laboratories, offices, lecture halls, and computing facilities, and their employees make countless small decisions every day that collectively shape the institution’s energy footprint. Understanding what drives those decisions among the people who occupy these buildings for years, rather than for the short span of a degree program, could unlock cost-effective strategies for reducing organizational energy consumption.

The study was conducted in a context where energy is subsidized, meaning that direct financial incentives to conserve are limited. This setting is theoretically important. In countries or organizations where electricity prices are kept artificially low, the usual economic levers that encourage conservation are weakened, and psychological drivers may carry proportionally more weight. The researchers reasoned that in such subsidized-energy contexts, the standard TPB variables might not tell the whole story, and that additional constructs drawn from moral psychology and motivation science could fill the explanatory gap.

To test this, the team extended the classic model with two constructs. The first is moral norm, sometimes called personal norm, which captures an individual’s sense of ethical obligation to act. In this study, moral norm was measured through items asking whether employees felt it was their moral duty to switch off unnecessary lights and devices at the end of the working day, whether such actions were part of their ethical code, whether they felt obligated to prevent colleagues from leaving equipment running, and whether they experienced guilt when failing to do so. The second addition is intrinsic motivation, the drive to perform a behavior because it is inherently satisfying or chosen freely rather than externally rewarded. Employees were asked whether they reduced energy use because they had chosen to, because they believed it beneficial, and whether they felt pleasure and satisfaction when turning off unnecessary equipment.

The results were dramatic. The original TPB model, containing only attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, explained 30 percent of the variance in employees’ energy conservation intentions. That is a respectable figure by behavioral science standards, but when the researchers added moral norm and intrinsic motivation to the model, the explained variance rose to 54 percent, a near-doubling of predictive power. In statistical terms, the two new constructs accounted for nearly a quarter of all variance in intention beyond what the classic variables captured, demonstrating that the psychological machinery behind workplace energy conservation is substantially richer than the standard model assumes.

Equally revealing was which variables mattered in the extended model. All constructs except subjective norm were significantly associated with energy conservation intention. In other words, employees’ own positive evaluations of saving energy, their confidence in their ability to act, their sense of moral obligation, and their intrinsic motivation all predicted stronger intentions to conserve, but the perceived expectations of influential others did not. The authors are careful to interpret this nuance. Rather than concluding that subjective norms are universally unimportant, they argue that the influence of social pressure may be contingent upon organizational and contextual conditions. In a subsidized-energy environment where conservation is not a salient social cause, the expectations of colleagues and family may simply carry less weight than personal conviction.

The measurement instruments themselves offer a window into the concrete behaviors at stake. Energy conservation intention was assessed through specific plans for the coming week: turning off office lights when leaving an empty room, unplugging a laptop charger once the battery is full, switching off a fan when departing, and suggesting energy-saving practices to colleagues. Attitude items framed these same actions as important, helpful, beneficial to the environment and the university, and responsible. Perceived behavioral control probed whether conservation methods were difficult, whether employees could turn off unnecessary appliances, and whether they had the resources, time, and opportunity to do so. This behavioral specificity grounds the abstract psychological constructs in the mundane, repeated choices that determine a building’s daily electricity draw.

The practical implications extend well beyond academia. For managers, planners, and sustainability officers, the findings suggest that campaigns built purely on social messaging, telling employees that others expect them to save energy, may underperform in contexts like the one studied. Instead, interventions that activate moral reasoning, for example by framing energy waste as an ethical failure with consequences for the institution and the environment, and those that cultivate intrinsic satisfaction, perhaps by giving employees autonomy over their conservation choices and recognizing the personal value of their actions, are likely to be more effective. Because moral norms and intrinsic motivation are internal states, they can potentially be nurtured through communication, education, and workplace culture rather than through expensive pricing mechanisms or infrastructure upgrades, making them attractive tools for cost-effective demand reduction.

Theoretically, the study contributes a more context-sensitive framework for understanding workplace conservation behavior. It demonstrates that in subsidized-energy settings where direct financial incentives are limited, moral norm and intrinsic motivation substantially enhance the explanatory power of the TPB and explain additional variance in intentions beyond that accounted for by subjective norm. The research, approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Tarbiat Modares University and conducted with informed consent under the Declaration of Helsinki, received no specific external funding. As universities and other large organizations worldwide confront rising energy costs and climate commitments, the message from this work is clear: the path to a lower-carbon workplace may run not through peer pressure but through conscience and the quiet satisfaction of doing the right thing, one switched-off light at a time.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of workplace energy conservation intentions among university faculty and staff using an extended Theory of Planned Behavior model

Article Title: Expanding the theory of planned behavior to better predict energy conservation intentions in the workplace

Article References: Expanding the theory of planned behavior to better predict energy conservation intentions in the workplace. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04572-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04572-0

Keywords: energy conservation, Theory of Planned Behavior, moral norm, intrinsic motivation, workplace behavior, university faculty and staff, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, subsidized energy, structural equation model, prosocial behavior, Discover Sustainability

The research, published in SSM – Population Health, was conducted by Joachim Gerich of the University of Linz and colleagues at the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Germany. Rather than asking workers retrospectively how many days they had dragged themselves into the office while unwell, a method prone to memory distortion, the team deployed a factorial survey experiment. More than 3,500 employees, drawn as a follow-up to the nationally representative BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2024, each evaluated ten hypothetical scenarios in which they woke up feeling unwell. The scenarios systematically varied symptoms, body temperature, infectiousness, workload, team dynamics, attendance pressure, weekday and even weather, and respondents chose between calling in sick, going to work on-site, or working remotely if their job allowed it.

The results were striking in their clarity. Body temperature emerged as the dominant predictor of attendance behavior, accounting for by far the largest share of explained variance. At a mildly elevated 37.5 degrees Celsius, the probability of attending work on-site dropped by roughly 15 percentage points compared with normal temperature. At 38.3 degrees Celsius, a genuine fever, the probability collapsed by 54 percentage points. Strong cold symptoms, such as feeling weak and exhausted with a severe headache, reduced the likelihood of working by about 12 percentage points. No other situational factor came close to this explanatory power, confirming the classical model of Steers and Rhodes from 1978, which posits that ill-health acts as the central gatekeeper of attendance decisions.

But the study’s most consequential finding concerns what happens when the feverish employee has a laptop and a home office. Among respondents with a remote work option, a fever of 38.3 degrees still pushed 66 percent toward sick leave, but 28 percent chose to work from home and a stubborn 7 percent even went to the physical workplace. At the milder temperature of 37.5 degrees, remote workers were actually more likely to work from home than to call in sick. This pattern supports the theoretical argument of Fiorini that the availability of remote work raises the threshold of illness severity at which employees perceive themselves as sick enough to rest. In effect, the home office has become a middle path that absorbs many of the mild and moderate illness episodes that would once have ended in either full attendance or full absence.

The experiment also illuminated how contextual pressures operate only within a specific window of ambiguity. Attendance pressure from supervisors, the fear of overburdening colleagues, team cohesion and infectiousness all significantly shaped decisions, but their effects were concentrated at normal or moderately elevated temperatures, where the right course of action is genuinely unclear. When symptoms were very mild or very severe, these factors faded into irrelevance, echoing a hierarchical model of decision-making in which people skip deliberative stages when the answer seems obvious. Notably, high attendance pressure increased on-site presenteeism but left virtual presenteeism untouched, suggesting that managerial pressure operates primarily by pulling bodies into buildings rather than by extracting work in general.

Social dynamics within teams proved more influential than individual workload. When respondents imagined that their absence would significantly increase their colleagues’ workload, they became markedly more likely to work while ill, both on-site and remotely. Conversely, when they faced working alongside colleagues they did not get along with, the probability of calling in sick rose. Interestingly, the much-discussed Monday effect, the tendency for absence rates to spike at the start of the week in observational data, vanished entirely in the experimental setting, lending weight to the argument that Monday absences largely reflect illnesses that begin over the weekend rather than motivational shirking.

Perhaps the most sobering result is how persistent presenteeism remains even under objectively severe conditions. Across the full sample, the overall probability of working in some form, whether on-site or remotely, still reached 30 percent at a body temperature of 38.3 degrees Celsius. Men were slightly more prone to this than women, showing 32 percent presenteeism at high fever compared with 28 percent for women, and men with remote options favored virtual presenteeism while women more often chose the on-site route. Given that standard medical advice for acute febrile illness is rest and recovery, the authors caution that this persistence may deliver short-term productivity at the cost of long-term health depletion, a trade-off documented in prior research linking working while ill to serious cardiovascular events.

The motivational analysis added a revealing psychological layer. Respondents who chose to work despite illness rated their reasons on a scale, and the pattern shifted with severity. Inner convictions and principles were rated as the most important motive overall, followed by concern for the well-being of others and the accumulation of unfinished work. Crucially, as body temperature rose, those who still worked attached escalating importance to self-oriented and avoidance-oriented motives: protecting their reputation, advancing their career, avoiding unpleasant conversations, and preventing work from piling up. Prosocial concern for others, by contrast, remained flat across temperature levels. In other words, the sicker people were, the more their decision to work reflected personal disposition and identity rather than genuine consideration for colleagues or customers.

The study’s design carries both strengths and limits. The factorial survey approach, with its D-efficient orthogonal design and random assignment of scenarios, allows causal inference about situational effects that retrospective surveys cannot provide, and the preregistered analysis strengthens confidence in the findings. Yet hypothetical vignettes measure stated intentions rather than actual behavior, and the scenarios focused on acute cold-like illness, so the conclusions may not extend to chronic conditions, mental health problems or episodic diseases where working through symptoms can sometimes be adaptive. Factors such as organizational culture, leadership style and caregiving responsibilities also lay outside the experimental frame.

The implications for occupational and public health are nonetheless significant. Remote work appears to reduce outright absence in some situations, but it also seems to normalize working through mild illness and to blur the boundary between recovery and labor. As flexible arrangements become a permanent fixture of working life, organizations may need to make explicit that a moderately elevated temperature is a signal to rest, not an invitation to log in from the sofa. The German data suggest that without such norms, the flexibility that protects teams from infection and eases the daily commute may simultaneously erode the recovery time on which long-term health and productivity ultimately depend.

Subject of Research: Situational factors influencing sickness presenteeism and virtual versus on-site work attendance decisions among German employees

Article Title: The situational contingency of virtual and on-site workplace attendance decisions in Germany: a vignette-based approach

Article References: Gerich, J., Herdegen, N., Koch, A., Kroczek, M., Kugler, P., Meyer, S.-C., Perleberg, M., & Späth, J. (2026). The situational contingency of virtual and on-site workplace attendance decisions in Germany: a vignette-based approach. SSM – Population Health, Article 101979. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101979

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101979

Keywords: sickness presenteeism, remote work, attendance decisions, factorial survey, body temperature, occupational health, Germany, workplace behavior, virtual presenteeism, sickness absence, team cohesion, attendance pressure