The office pot plant has copped a lot of criticism as a symbol of corporate or government waste.
Taxpayer, ratepayer and shareholder funded foliage has often been stripped from offices by efficiency or cost-cutting crusaders.
But that might be short-term thinking as leafy-green offices enriched with plants can boost productivity by 15 per cent, according to Professor Alex Haslam of University of Queensland's School of Psychology.
The international study assesses the long-term impacts of plants in an office environment and the findings challenge the belief that money spent on plants is money wasted.
Prof Haslam, a co-author, says the research team examined the impact of "lean" versus "green" office space on employees from two large commercial offices in the UK and the Netherlands.
Their results challenge modern business philosophies that suggest a lean office is a more productive one, he says.
"Modern offices and desks have been stripped back to create sparse spaces - our findings question this widespread theory that less is more - sometimes less is just less," he says in a statement about the research paper.
Investing in landscaping an office may pay off through an increase in office workers' quality of life and productivity, he said.
"Lean, it appears, is meaner than green, not only because it is less pleasant but also because it is less productive," concludes the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
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