Collaboration in open-plan offices

Abstract

Many organisations have adopted open-plan offices, rooms with few barriers between desksthat are shared by more than four people, to facilitate collaboration, productivity, and innovation.Yet researchers have found that open-plan offices do not consistently promote positive outcomes,and are often associated with unintended consequences like conflict, distractions, and reducedproductivity. A major area of disagreement in the literature relates to whether open-plan officesfacilitate collaborative behaviours (i.e. cooperation, coordination, information sharing). Althoughsome researchers argue that open-plan offices facilitate interaction by bringing people into physicalproximity, others suggest that open-plan offices lack the architectural privacy to allow employees totalk openly, without being overheard by others. There is not clear empirical support for eitherperspective.In this dissertation, I resolve mixed findings about the link between open-plan offices andcollaboration by drawing on situated cognition theory. I show that a combination of individualschemas (i.e. mental models), physical contexts (i.e. open-plan offices), and social contexts (e.g.team relationships) combine to shape how individuals and teams use open-plan offices tocollaborate. Rather than focusing on whether or not open-plan offices facilitate collaboration, Idescribe the open-plan office as a collaborative scaffold that facilitates particular kinds ofcollaborative behaviours (e.g. instant information sharing, vicarious learning) under particularcircumstances (e.g. where team members have collaborative norms and high levels of taskinterdependence).I explore the relationship between open-plan offices and collaborative behaviourthrough three qualitative studies.In Study 1, I examined how new collaborative relationships form in open-plan officesthrough a single case-study of a collaborative science building. I conducted 245 hours ofobservation and interviews with 40 employees. The findings of Study 1 challenge existing researchthat suggests that chance encounters are the link between open-plan offices and collaboration.Instead I found that new collaborative relationships are formed through serendipitous encountersthat involve an element of both intention and chance.In Study 2, I explored the situations in which open-plan offices facilitate and inhibitcollaboration, through a comparative case-study of eight groups of employees in open-plan offices.I used the same data for Study 1 and 2. In Study 2, I resolved mixed findings in the existingliterature about open-plan offices and collaboration. I found the interplay between individualschemas (role, rule, person) and contexts (physical, social, and embodied) shaped whether or notgroups used the open-plan office to collaborate. Specifically, open-plan offices facilitatecollaboration when the majority of people in an office want to collaborate and adjust theirbehaviour to respect their colleagues’ noise preferences. In Study 3, I examined how teams use open-plan office to collaborate through a comparativecase-study of seven teams in open-plan offices. I conducted 251 hours of observations andinterviews with 33 team members from three organisations. The findings of Study 3 show thatopen-plan offices are a collaborative scaffold that facilitates four kinds of collaborative behaviours:instant information sharing, informal cooperation, contextualised cooperation, and vicariouslearning. I also found that teams with collaborative norms and high-levels of task-interdependenceovercame the negative aspects of open-plan offices, such as distractions and lack of privacy,because they had relationships that allowed them to openly discuss office noise.Overall, in this dissertation, I make four key contributions. First, I contribute to research onthe relationship between open-plan offices and collaboration, by exploring collaboration as aprocess, rather than an outcome. In contrast to existing literature, where researchers have focusedon whether or not open-plan offices facilitate collaboration, I outline the circumstances under whichopen-plan offices are likely to have positive, negative, and neutral impacts on collaboration.Second, unlike existing studies that have examined patterns of interactions between establishedcolleagues in open-plan offices, I describe how new collaborative relationships form in open-planoffices. In contrast to the existing literature, where researchers have argued that chance encountersare the link between open-plan offices and collaboration, I find that new collaborative relationshipsform as a result of serendipitous encounters that involve both intention and chance. Third, I explainmixed empirical findings about the link between open-plan offices and collaboration by showingthat employees use open-plan offices to collaborate when the majority of people in an open-planoffice want to work together and when formal task-interdependencies create incentives forcollaboration. Fourth, this dissertation is one of the first empirical studies of teams in open-planoffices. Unlike existing research, which has focused on individual responses to open-plan offices, Ifound that team members are able to overcome the negative impacts of open-plan offices such asdistractions and interruption. Overall in this dissertation, I show that open-plan offices do notalways facilitate collaboration. Thus, to foster collaboration in open-plan offices, managers shouldexplain the benefits of collaboration, model collaborative behaviours, design interdependencieswithin and between work units, and reward employees who collaborate.