Providing good indoor environmental quality (IEQ) that satisfies building occupants is an essential component for sustainable and healthy buildings. Existing studies mainly analysed the importance of environmental factors to subject’s satisfaction, but overlooked the influence by personal factor, especially the psychological dimensions. We aims to explore the important personal factors that affect subject’s IEQ satisfaction. We conducted a cross-sectional assessment which surveyed 1162 individuals on their satisfaction with 18 IEQ parameters and their corresponding personal factors (job satisfaction, life satisfaction, Big Five personality traits, sex and age) in nine air-conditioned commercial buildings in Singapore. Analyses using proportional odds ordinal logistic regression suggested occupants with higher job and life satisfactions were, respectively, 1.8 – 3.1 and 1.4 – 2.2 times more likely satisfied with the indoor environment. In particular, the odds ratio (OR) for overall environment satisfaction in job and life satisfaction were 3.1 (95% CI: 2.4 – 4) and 2.2 (95% CI: 1.7 – 2.8). We speculate that occupant’s satisfactions with their job and the environment are coherent, meaning that better workspace could improve job satisfaction and vice versa. Overall, personality traits, sex and age groups had a small effect on IEQ satisfaction. Each of the five personality traits has some associations with different IEQ parameters, but all these impacts were small. Female were slightly more dissatisfied with the workspace temperature, humidity, stuffiness, natural light, glare sound privacy and cleanliness than male. Lastly, occupant’s age did not show consistent impacts on their satisfaction with the workspace IEQ.

Nine Green Mark certified, air-conditioned office, buildings in Singapore were surveyed resulting in 1006 individual responses. Our survey scope only included staff who were performing office work and had personal workstations, and excluded any non-office spaces within the same building to maintain consistency. In each building, at least 10 % of the total occupancy were surveyed. We provided individual survey link for each building, while the facility management team distributed this link to all target occupants in the building. In this study, we collected responses from occupant’s (i) satisfaction with their workspace environment, (ii) demographics, (iii) job satisfaction, (iv) life satisfaction, and (v) personality traits.