Smoke and leaders: how air pollution affects management
We know toxic air is bad news. But could it cause leaders to act more abusively at work? Yes it can, says Ussama Khan’s new research
- Air pollution is a serious health hazard affecting people all over the world — especially already vulnerable populations in developing nations. Climate change is exacerbating the problem.
- In addition to one’s physical wellbeing, pollution affects mental and emotional health. Appraised air pollution (i.e., being aware of it) takes a toll on leaders and on those they manage.
- This is shown in a new paper by Ussama Khan and two co-authors, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Integrating two theories relevant to stress, the data-backed paper links higher pollution appraisals to bosses behaving badly.
- Surprisingly, and relevant to remote work arrangements, the research finds that employees in unpolluted areas may be harmed by higher levels of air pollution perceived by their bosses. The research also offers five tips to counteract the harm.
According to Ussama Khan’s new research which links air pollution and poor leadership, toxic air could cause leaders to act more abusively at work. On the job, even if you’re not breathing it directly, it’s important to be aware that toxic air can harm you and your team.
Professor Ussama Khan of London Business School was very aware of toxic air pollution growing up in Lahore, Pakistan. Most everyone there was. Along with New Delhi, India, Lahore is one of the most polluted cities in the world.
“Being in Lahore was, and still is, a sensory experience,” Ussama says. “For a large part of the year, you feel surrounded by a thick smog with a burning smell that itches your eyes, smells like burnt plastic, and makes you struggle to breath. It affects you most early in the morning and late at night.”
In contrast, while pursuing his PhD in Management at the University of Washington in Seattle, thick smog was rarely a problem; the air in the Pacific Northwest is generally very clean. And yet, climate change awareness crept to the fore for most everyone. Off-the-charts forest fires caused some spikes in toxic air that were the talk of Seattle and New York City, for example, as well as the isles of Greece.
Coinciding with this increased awareness of toxic air in the U.S. and Europe, Ussama was deciding to look at its impact on leadership – an understudied area. “Most of the research on air pollution looks at physical aspects of it, including developmental delays in children and other important health issues. I saw there was also more to learn about pollution’s impact on social behaviour,” he explains. “And looking at leadership is interesting because of crossover effects: when leaders are affected, it may also affect their direct reports.”
As forest fires, heatwaves and persistently higher temperatures are exacerbating air quality issues, Ussama’s research related to climate change and leadership was recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Titled “A Breath of Toxic Air: The Relationship Between Appraised Air Pollution, Abusive Supervision, and Laissez-Faire Leadership Through the Dual- Mediating Pathways of Negative Affect and Somatic Complaints,” it was written with coauthors Charmi Patel and Christopher M. Barnes. In a nutshell, the paper focuses on toxic air’s challenges to management and everyone else at work.
Discover fresh perspectives and research insights from LBS
"Ussama’s work explains how stress that is experienced by a leader can spill over to impact followers, even in remote work arrangements."
Why so stressed out?
So, why is your boss yelling at you today? Or why won’t top management pick up the phone to handle a critical issue in a timely manner? Could stress explain some of the aggressive or avoidant behaviours experienced at work? Stress is a plausible trigger for many managerial misfires, after all.
Drawing from previous research in psychology, Ussama and his collaborators turned to two well established theories regarding stress. One is known as the transactional theory of stress, from the 1984 book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. In it, authors Richard S. Lazarus and Susan Folkman posit that an experience — say, a day with particularly noxious air pollution — is experienced as a stressor when it is perceived as harmful and can’t be fixed. In stressful situations, people are affected in three ways: via (1) their morale, (2) their physical health and (3) their social functioning. All three are examined in Ussama’s study.
A second theory relevant to Ussama’s work explains how stress that is experienced by a leader can spillover to impact followers, even in remote work arrangements.
With the two theories integrated, the study’s co-authors propose that when today’s leaders appraise heavy air pollution, they are strained emotionally and physically, which crosses over to harm subordinates. This harm to subordinates is caused by leaders’ diminished social functioning, which may be manifested in aggressive hostility (e.g., yelling) or by prompting them to withdraw (ignoring key issues) — both of which hinder effective management. Here’s a schematic of their model:
Moving left to right, the diagram first connects being aware of higher levels of air pollution with more “somatic complaints” – e.g., coughing or feeling lousy — and “negative affect” – e.g., lower morale or feeling upset. And then those two pathways may connect to leaders’ “abusive supervision” – e.g., confrontation or aggression at work – as well as “laissez-fair leadership” – e.g., avoidant behaviour, withdrawing or shrugging off responsibilities. Through these negative behaviours, pollution’s harm is spread at work.
Testing the model
To check to see if their theoretical model was valid, Ussama et al. surveyed dozens of executives in different cities in India – a country where air pollution caused 17.8% of all deaths in 2019, or 1.67 million deaths that year.
First, they contacted hundreds of leaders in India to participate in the study. Of those that could keep daily diaries for nearly 10 consecutive workdays and had direct reports that could also, the final study was based on complete responses from 58 leaders and their subordinates. That data included 569 daily surveys from leaders and 1,714 daily surveys from their reports.
Analysing the survey data, the theoretical model was verified in all areas but one: There wasn’t enough evidence to link “somatic complaints” to “laissez-faire leadership.” Perhaps there’s no correlation, or perhaps further research is needed to disentangle other issues. But the bigger news was that “abusive supervision” was linked to days with higher levels of perceived pollution, controlling for other factors. These results were statistically significant. So were the results linking “negative affect” on high pollution days to “laissez-faire leadership.”
Practical implications
Toxic air, toxic boss? If this study makes you weary of ever having a boss based in New Delhi, hold on before you judge. The research is careful to detect daily changes in perceived pollution over a set time, controlling for other factors — such as the overall workload, day of the week and the actual air quality based on particulate matter or pollution particles. That is to say, the study’s evidence does not point to pollution per se causing bad leadership: it points to variations in awareness of pollution causing variations in bad leadership behaviours.
Remember that a fundamental cause of stress is feeling that it’s out of your control. Experiencing flight turbulence and traffic jams can be particularly stressful for this reason. To take some control of the reins, reducing the root cause of the stress is key. To that end, Ussama and coauthors offer practical advice for leaders — and for HR departments.
Here are five tips to help counteract pollution’s harm:
- Allow employees to work from home on days with particularly high air pollution.
- Offer greater flexibility in scheduling around peak pollution times.
- Provide paid leave or make it easier to take off air pollution-related sick days.
- Equip employees with face masks and offices with air purifiers.
- Create pollution alerts to keep employees aware of when they should mitigate their exposure to toxic air.
Taking these steps can help leaders feel they are helping. And that feeling is itself helpful. According to Ussama, another takeaway from the study is just raising awareness among leaders that pollution can harm their wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of the people they manage. “And so, with this awareness, leaders can be more mindful and try to mitigate or temper bad leadership behaviours,” Ussama adds.
“I’m particularly interested in studying the people who are most vulnerable to issues around climate change, and that includes the people hardest hit by poverty and discrimination”
Remote work in polluted times and the bigger picture
With leaders and their direct reports surveyed in different Indian cities, this study made a surprising discovery: Workers could suffer from air pollution without breathing it in firsthand. In other words, the employees’ surveys showed that perceptions of their bosses behaving badly were not related to their own perceptions of pollution, but their bosses’. And so, on a really toxic day in Mumbai, for example, remote workers in Calcutta and New Delhi were as likely to object to their Mumbai-based leader’s behaviour as workers based in the same building. “This was a nice way to remove the possibility that employees are upset by pollution and so are reporting negatively about their bosses. We see that it really is the bosses’ appraisals of pollution,” Ussama explains.
At the same time, the finding makes this research relevant to people lucky enough to be surrounded by the most pristine air in the world. With increased globalisation, with more remote working setups, if toxic air is affecting managers in your organisation, you, too, may be negatively affected. “The fact is: climate change is taking a toll most everywhere,” Ussama emphasises.
For Ussama, this work fits into a larger research project to study how climate change is affecting people’s work. For a paper he’s working on now, he’s gathered evidence that air pollution also drives work/family conflict, with more conflicts at home reported on days with higher strains at work caused by exposure to air pollution. And for another paper, he’s looking at heat waves’ impact on leadership. “You can note that I’m particularly interested in studying the people who are most vulnerable to issues around climate change, and that includes the people hardest hit by poverty and discrimination,” he explains.
“Together, climate change, poverty and discrimination are three grand challenges the world faces. And too often the most vulnerable people, the most affected by these grand challenges, are peripheral in studies that focus on white collar workers and the developed world,” he adds. Keeping in mind what people face in still-developing countries, like his native Pakistan, obviously informs this work.
Photo: Ussama Ahmed Khan
Ussama Khan is Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School
