Conceptualizing Sustainable Occupant Behaviour in Offices from an interdisciplinary point of view: A Systematic review

Occupant Behaviour (OB) has been identified as one of the most influential factors that impact workplace space usage. In addition, it proven to be one of the key reasons for discrepancies between predicted and measured energy consumption of office buildings. The current interdisciplinary understanding of OB is hardly conducive to an exhaustive conclusion, with many premises and veiled explanations made during the research, design, and management process. This paper aims to review the existing literature that focuses on energy-related workplace OB from Social and Behavioural science and from Engineering science for two reasons. Firstly, to identify the theory, connotation, and application of occupant behaviour in both fields. Secondly, to identify the type of behaviour, triggers of behaviour, and theoretical support for defining the term “Sustainable Occupant Behaviour in Offices (SOBO)”. This review used the PRISMA approach with the addition of snowball papers. The demonstrated results cover three main findings: 1. The four types of OB relevant in workplaces are occupancy, adaptive behaviour, non-adaptive behaviour, and personal adaptive behaviour. 2. Building, environmental, contextual, and personal factors were the four types of influential factors for SOBO. 3. Current theoretical frameworks for SOBO are mainly based on the Theory of planned behaviour (TPB), the norm-activation model (NAM) and/or the motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) model. Findings are important for knowledge exchange and synergy processes between both disciplines in future studies.