Environmental Unfamiliarity and Work Performance: Evidence from Chinese Basketball during COVID-19

This paper examines the causal impact of the working environment on worker performance and explores the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, we use games from the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) as our research sample and exploit the “neutralvenuespolicy” induced by COVID-19 to address endogeneity concerns. Sports teams offer an ideal research setting, as each team competes both at home (familiar environment) and away (unfamiliar environment). The “neutral-venues policy”, which relocated all games to neutral sites without crowds, provides a quasi-experimental setting. We find that when teams no longer had to compete in their opponents’ courts, their performance significantly improved. This improvement is not driven by changes in referee behaviour, but rather by the absence of home crowd pressure and the avoidance of competing in regions with extreme cold temperatures. Furthermore, we show that even strong teams are unable to mitigate the negative impact of environmental disruptions. This paper provides important general implications by offering causal evidenceon how environmental conditions affect productivity when workers lack environmental familiarity.