Permeability Alongside ‘Sense of Community’ in Open Contemporary Work Organization—Coworking-Spaces

Abstract

Open, entrepreneurial, and collaboratively organized work forms are proliferating worldwide. A prominent form is coworking-spaces, run by specialized coworking-space providers or incumbent firms. Coworking- spaces host collocated work of individuals, often from diverse professional backgrounds. Initial empirical insights indicate that coworking-spaces portray a sense of community among users and independent professionals. Based on an inductive case study from four distinct coworking-spaces, we introduce permeability an organizational characteristic of open contemporary work in coworking- spaces. Insights from the case study further support to model three levels of permeability: spatial permeability, procedural permeability and relational permeability. We develop mechanisms of how permeability functions and identify outcomes on individual-level (job satisfaction, learning, work efficacy, and innoficacy) and organization-level outcomes (team and project, innovation, and venture performance).