While I share your (healthy) skepticism about scientific reporting, a good researcher would've attempted to structure their experiment to control for this very effect.
I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter mistaking correlation for causation.
>A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess.
Wrong, you lack the same basic, problem solving logic that I am referring to.
A good researcher would have asked additional questions such as "On a scale of 1-10" - "how enjoyable is the actual work that you do here?", "how satisfied are you with the amount of money that you are making?", "where do you see yourself in five years". These aren't the best quesions that I could come up with, I am just giving examples off the top of my head.
It would be easy to see how unhappy these workers are with other things in their lives rather than if they were in a cubicle vs a private office.
I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter mistaking correlation for causation.