Because of the assumed importance of atmosphere – and because atmosphere is at least partly created by managers and employees – managers often try to improve the atmosphere of their establishments. Thus, atmosphere can be considered as a “controllable” that managers can “manipulate”, as a tool to enhance the organizational performance. Such activities or investments are, however, risky – in particular due to the high degree of “causal ambiguity” involved, i.e. the relationship between various costly atmosphere enhancing activities and the potential contribution to the firm’s performance are ex ante to a substantial degree unknown (Thompson, 1967). Also, the performance of companies is dependent on multiple factors – not at least day-to-day operations. Furthermore, the value of the trade-off between investments in atmospheric efforts versus other activities believed to influence firm performance is also uncertain. This problem is further escalated because the term itself (atmosphere) is unclear, often
used with multiple meanings. Also, as indicated above, not only is the concept, i.e. whatto subsume under the concept, ambiguous, so are also existing insights with regard to “driving factors”, i.e. what factors that may influence atmosphere – as well as how and why so (for a detailed overview of the relevant literature, see Heide and Grønhaug,
2006).