Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper “ Determinants of Employees’ Personal & Collective Energy Con sumption and Conservation at Work”investigated employees’ behaviour and their impacts on energy-saving interventions at for public buildings. A questionnaire (N=119 employees in three workplaces in EU countries) was designed and the answers from respondents were analysed. Two types of energy consumption behaviour at work: personal and collective actions were identified from  employees’ profiles. In general, the research topic is interesting, but this study suffers from some methodological defects. The followings are some specific comments:

1. INTRODUCTION

It doesn’t fully reflect the objective of the paper, for example, energy usage’s breakdown should have been provided. The paper stresses ‘intervention’, studies on this issue should be included.

Inaccurate claims, e.g

1.      ” while the energy sector is the source of at least two-third of...”, which should be heating or building sector, not energy sector.

2.      “Pro-Environmental Behaviours (PEBs)” are abbreviated which should be explained.

Should be corrected and edited.

 

2.BACKGROUND

 “Based on all of the above, we formulate the following hypotheses:

“H1 & H2: Employees’ profile, in terms of (i) personal energy-saving norms, (ii) emotional

exhaustion (burnout), (iii) collective energy-saving responsibility & efficacy, (iv) awareness of energy wastage & knowledge of solution, (v) personal comfort / comfort levels, and (vi) demographicfactors (age, gender, children), will affect:

H1: their willingness to conserve energy at work.

H2: their energy-saving habits and behaviour at work.

....”

H1 & H2 should be removed.

 

3.MATERIALS AND METHODS

 3.3. Participants and Procedure

“The questionnaire was answered through an online platform by 119 participants in total”

Response rate should be given, is it 100%?

 

4. RESULSTS

The paper mentioned’ intervention’, did it performed? What is the result then. In general, the modeling equations were not presented, how could readers know the modeling results, for example, the parameters of Table 1-Table 4. Also R2 is very low generally, which means that the model’s goodness of fit is not sufficient. Inferences from the models are then questionable.  Specific comment is, for example, “PCA revealed the presence of two components...”. These two components should be dependent on the occupants’ profiles. Please specify how the personal & collective components were generated based on PCA analysis of the occupants' profiles. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study proposes and investigate a behavioural model that can be utilized in energy-saving interventions at the workplace.

Proofreading is required as authors have used both spellings (UK and US) like "behavior" (Line 52) and "behaviour" (Line 13). Check the spellings in Figure 1 and 3 as well. Also, there is inconsistency in use of CO2. 

Authors have not used citation tool hence the order or the citations is not correct, it is recommended to use referencing tool (ENDNOTE or Mandalay). Citation 30 and 31 appearing before 28 (Line 154).

The discussion and conclusion section does not relate the findings to the previously published literature so inclusion of the citations might improve the arguments provided. (Line 493-559)

 

The paper is very well written however authors have provided a future work research model which seems to be incomplete as not implemented so it will be appropriate to remove it from the paper and include in the new paper utilizing proposed model along with the results. Line 560 to 618 should be removed and included in new paper along with the results. However the authors can include the future directions here. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

the paper is very interesting and well-structured.

I suggest to improve the Introduction section. Please revise and enrich with argumentation the importance of this research, the research gap and problems that the investigation results fulfill. Give more information about the research object - why you proceeded the investigation with the chosen objects, what is the specific of the object, etc. Please describe the aim and goals of the research, state the authors' thesis, etc.

I hope that my recommendations will not be a problem for you. Best regards

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The topic of the manuscript is relevant, and its content may be of interest to potential readers. However, there are lot of gaps and shortcomings that authors need to remove before a manuscript can be published:

1. I believe that section 2 would be better called "Review of literature and formulation of hypotheses". Then it will not be appropriate to highlight subsection 2.1. It is not very good that the conclusion of this section is given at the beginning of it (lines 78-81). Regarding lines 121-143, the material presented in them should be transferred to sections 3 and 4.

2. The authors did not explain very clearly the difference between willingness to save energy and energy saving habits. A priori, there seems to be very little difference between them.

3. The hypotheses put forward by the authors, in my opinion, are somewhat trivial (This partly follows from the previous remark). It would be surprising if these hypotheses were not fulfilled.

4. The representativeness of the sample (only 119 respondents) raises certain doubts. Perhaps the authors themselves share these doubts (line 621).

5. Why do the authors pay such attention to emotional exhaustion? Other psychological barriers to saving energy are also possible. For example, some workers may be inattentive, lazy to perform energy-saving actions, etc.

6. The result of the survey (table 1) needs more explanation. In particular, what does the number 6.56 mean? Probably, this indicates the dominance of the energy-saving behavior model. Are there any contradictions between the survey results presented in blocks B and C? In particular, how to explain the differences between the numbers 6.40 and 4.09?

7. Can the authors claim that the results of the regression analysis are statistically significant? This is especially true for the data presented in Table 3.

8. Practical recommendations should be specified. It would be worthwhile to identify the most important factors influencing the behavior of employees and present specific recommendations for improving such behavior corresponding to these factors. As for the Internet of Things, this is an interesting direction, but, as I understand, it is considered by the authors mainly in the context of future research.

9. It is necessary to more clearly describe the scientific novelty of the results of the conducted research. How do these results differ from the results previously obtained by other scientists? This can be indicated in section 5 of the manuscript.

10. Style and grammar need some improvement. Some sentences could be worded better. For example, this applies to the sentence in lines 145-147. It seems to me that the observations should be described as the results of the research performed (ie in sections 4 and 5).

I think it is appropriate to acquaint the authors with these comments, suggestions and questions. I hope that such acquaintance help to improve the quality of the manuscript, which is expected to be published in such a high-ranking journal as "Sustainability".

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Some of the issues were addressed by the authors but not the important ones. Specifically

3. Materials and Methods

Model equations for “Multiple Linear Regression Results” are missing. What are B and β represent in the model?

4. RESULSTS

Regarding the issues of Materials and Methods, the modeling equations were not presented, how could readers know the modeling results, for example, the parameters of Table 1-Table 4. Also R2 is very low generally, which means that the model’s goodness of fit is not sufficient. Inferences from the models are then questionable. Specific comment is, for example, “PCA revealed the presence of two components...”. It is specify how the PCA analysis leads to the two components. In other words, how the personal & collective components were generated based on PCA analysis of the occupants' profiles.

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

In my opinion, the text of the manuscript has improved. The authors took into account a number of my comments. The authors provided sufficiently reasoned explanations for some of my remarks.

At the same time, I was not entirely satisfied with the authors' answers to the following three comments from my previous review:

6. The result of the survey (table 1) needs more explanation. In particular, what does the number 6.56 mean? Probably, this indicates the dominance of the energy-saving behavior model. Are there any contradictions between the survey results presented in blocks B and C? In particular, how to explain the differences between the numbers 6.40 and 4.09?

Reviewer's comment: The text fragment indicated by the authors only states the differences between the numbers, and does not explain the reasons for such differences. I hope that the authors will try to find out these reasons in their further research.

7. Can the authors claim that the results of the regression analysis are statistically significant? This is especially true for the data presented in Table 3.

Reviewer's comment: My doubt about the statistical significance of the results, presented in particular in Table 3, was caused, first of all, by the low value of the coefficient of determination R2.

9. It is necessary to more clearly describe the scientific novelty of the results of the conducted research. How do these results differ from the results previously obtained by other scientists? This can be indicated in section 5 of the manuscript.

Reviewer's comment: The authors took this remark into account to some extent by comparing their results with those of other scientists in section 5. However, according to most of the results, the authors note their agreement with already known results. It would be desirable to put more emphasis on the differences. This would make it possible to better characterize the scientific novelty of the results of the research carried out by the authors.

Finally, I urge the authors to carefully check the final text of their manuscript to avoid typos and grammatical errors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

I have commented three times on the missing modeling equations. Please provide the equation. In other words, elaborate “Predicted Variable” = Intercept + Σ (Bi x 376 “Predictor Variable”i) , where i represents the different predictors in the model"...what are your predicted variables...etc. If there are many, show one example.

There are typos, for example, scree->screen, please go through the article. 

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf