The Restorative Quality of the Work Environments: The Moderation Effect of Environmental Resources between Job Demands and Mindfulness

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks to the authors for sharing their manuscript. I think they described an interesting study, my comments relate mainly to small corrections:

1.      I would recommend to restructure the abstract. Now half of the abstract refers to the background, then the authors briefly describe the aim, method and results of the study. It seems to me that it will be useful to reduce the background and describe in more detail the study participants, instruments and, most importantly, the results.

2.      The study is cross-sectional, it would be better to change the "affect" in the hypotheses to "correlate with" or “associate with”.

3.      Describing the results of exploratory factor analysis, the authors do not show KMO and Bartlett’s test of sphericity.

4.      There is no conclusion in the manuscript, it seems to me a good idea to highlight it as the final part of the article.

Author Response

Thank you very much to taking time to read our work. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the paper “The Restorative Quality of The Work Environments: The Moderation Effect of an Environmental Resources between Job Demands and Mindfulness”. This paper examined the relatively understudied relationship between cognitive work demand and mindfulness, highlighting the moderating role of the perceived restorative environment. In general, this manuscript is well-written and informative. Enhancing the clarity of the methods and result sections; adding supplemental materials; and more thorough discussion of the implications and limitations of the study can further enhance this manuscript.

Title

·        “The Restorative Quality of The Work Environments: The Moderation Effect of an Environmental Resources between Job Demands and Mindfulness”. Please delete the “an” before “Environmental”.

Introduction

·       p.2 “This model describes the relationship between job/personal resources and positive outcomes and the buffering effect of resources on the adverse impact of job demands on different psychosocial and work-related outcomes.” This sentence is long and difficult to follow. Please consider breaking it down into 2 sentences.  Additionally, “the buffering effect of resources” this term is confusing because a reader might not understand whether the authors are talking about the environmental resource or personal resource here. Please pick two distinct terms and use them consistently throughout the paper.

·       P.2 The last paragraph in the introduction only has one sentence and is likely too short to be an independent paragraph. Having one sentence as an independent paragraph also happened several times in the result section. Please revise.

Theoretical Background

·       p.2 “For example, poor lighting, extreme temperature, high noise, and poor physical design work can affect physical and psychological resources of employees, increasing mental fatigue, concentration, and attention to work tasks.” What does “poor physical design work” mean? Did you mean “poor physical design”? Can you please give a few examples of poor physical design from previous literature to provide more context? Thanks.

·       p.2-3. The authors mentioned several theories, such as the Attention Restoration Theory and the Conservation of Resources Theory. Can the authors please articulate whether these theories discussed perceived or objective environmental? Why study perceived instead of an objective environment in this study?

 

Methodology

·       p. 5. “Socio-demographic variables”, participants’ work was divided into 5 sectors, How about construction and other blue color work? Which category would these types of work belong to?

·       p. 5 Measures: please add appendices/supplementary materials of the “Perceived Restrictiveness Scale”, “Job Demands”, and “Mindfulness” to help readers better understand/evaluate the appropriateness of these measures.

·       p.6 “Mindfulness was measured with the Attention Awareness Scale ”,  please only italicize “Mindfulness”.

·       p. 5 The wording of the Restorativeness measures “I would like to spend more time looking at the surroundings “ are a bit vague. Is it referring to surroundings at work? Does Restorativeness apply to people working from home?

·       p.6 “Respondents rate each item on a 6-point Likert scale from almost always (= 1) to almost never (= 6). A sample item from the scale is ‘find myself doing things without paying attention’”. The coding of mindfulness is very confusing to me. My understanding is that “almost never (=6)” in negatively worded questions (such as the given example) reflects higher mindfulness. Are all questions in the scale negatively worded to reflect the lack of mindfulness? Please clarify the nature of the questions in the main text, give a few more examples, and also present the mindfulness sale in an appendix.

·       p.6. My understanding is that the authors treated Likert scale items as continuous, please cite methodological literature to justify that decision and examine the normality of the variables to make sure that the OLS assumptions are met.

·       p. 6 Exploratory Factor Analysis. Please report the factor loadings of items in the text and a table or appendix. Please also report how much variance your factor solution (one factor) accounted for. You might also consider adding a footnote in the table/appendix to clarify your method of factor extraction and rotation for clarity.

Results

·       p.6 Descriptive Statistics: The authors need to better describe the sample. For instance, what percentage of participants were in which sector?

·       Table 2: Please report the actual p-values rather than representing them with “n.s”.

·       p.7 “Results reveal the moderating effect of restorativeness between cognitive demands and mindfulness (β = 0.182, 95% CI = -0.10 to -0.25, t = 4.89, p < 0.001).” Where is the moderating effect in the table? Which step was the interaction term added to the hierarchical regression model?

·       “Specifically, the test of the simple slopes indicated that, when employees perceived low or average levels of restorativeness, cognitive demands positively affect mindfulness (β = -0.612, 95% CI = -0.82 to -0.39, t = -5.57, p < 0.001 and β = -0.382, 95% CI = -0.5 to -0.21, t = -4.61, p < 0.001).” As I commented on earlier, the coding of mindfulness is confusing. Here, the authors suggested that cognitive demands positively affect mindfulness, however, β is negative. Please clarify.

Discussion

·       P9. Last paragraph: Can this study be generalized to workers in industries and jobs that have low cognitive demands but high physical demands?

·       “Finally, future studies should investigate which specific elements of the physical work context are able to restore job resources. To achieve this aim, a specifical questionnaire to identify the environmental quality of the work context should be developed.“ Would those questions be field or sector-specific? Also, please be a bit more specific when explaining the limitation of convenience sampling.

 

·       Does this study have implications for working remotely/virtually since people have options regarding where to work in remote work?

English language editing is recommended. The organization of paragraphs can be improved. Some sentences can be revised for clarity as I shared in my detailed comments. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for indicating ways to improve our manuscript. We are really grateful for the thoughtful comments and for taking time to read our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The work lacks the names of the authors and their affiliations. The text should be written in an impersonal style.

Abstract - needs major improvement. Abstract should be able to: describe the paper; state the problem or the key issue; carry the reader through the research methodology, what it has found, and what conclusion have been reached from these findings.

Introduction - needs improvement. Its purpose is to introduce the subject and indicate what is the novelty of the study in relation to the state of knowledge in this area of science. The introduction should end with a clearly defined goal or goals of the work.

Figure 1 and 2 should be removed. They are unnecessary.

In Methodology (Section 3.1.) more details about the study participants should be provided. Data on age and number of years of work, working time per day, working conditions will be valuable.

The discussion should be merged into one chapter with Results.

There is no Conclusions chapter in the text.

References - they should be formatted according to the requirements of the journal. Remove very old sources - from the 90s.

Moderate editing of English language required. I have some notes to the writing style not for English grammar. The text is difficult to read due to the intricate wording and unnecessary repetition of the same information.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer. 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks to the authors for the corrections.  I believe that the manuscript can be recommended for publication. Technical comment: Pay attention to the note to Table 2.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for all the suggestions. We have improved Table 2.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors thoughtfully addressed my comments. The manuscript has improved substantially. I don't have substantive comments for the revised manuscript. Please carefully format the tables before publication. For instance, the note section of Table 2 is hard to read. Additionally, some decimal points in Table 7 were presented as commas.  

Please conduct a final round of edits. 

Author Response

We appreciate the reviewer's positive evaluation of our work and comments. We have modified Table 2 and 7, and we have conducted a final round of edits.

Reviewer 3 Report

I accept the changes made by the authors.

Author Response

Thanks to the reviewer for helping us to improve our work.