Abstract
Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined—using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers—the effect of open office architectures on employees' face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour’.
Highlights
Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have long captured human interest
Sociological theory presents a strong argument that removing spatial boundaries to bring more people into contact should increase collaboration and collective intelligence
We focus on the most basic set of empirical questions: what is the effect of transitioning from cubicles to open workspaces on the overall volume and type of interaction, with what implications for organizational performance based on the company’s own performance management system? In the second study, we replicate the first study’s results and consider two more-targeted empirical questions: how does spatial distance between workstations moderate the effect of transitioning from cubicles to open workspaces and how do individual employee interaction networks, both F2F and electronic, change differentially? While the first study considers interactions involving individuals, the second considers interactions for dyads, allowing a more precise but limited investigation of the effects
Summary
Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have long captured human interest. Yet even as social scientists continue to study the value of a vast array of boundaries [1], in an era in which the nature of work is changing [2,3,4], managers and organizational scholars have increasingly framed boundaries as barriers to interaction that ought to be spanned [5,6,7,8], permeated [9] or blurred [10] to increase collaboration. Spatial boundaries have long served a functional role at multiple levels of analysis, helping people make sense of their environment by modularizing it [31], clarifying who is watching and who is not, who has information and who does not, who belongs and who does not, who controls what and who does not, to whom one answers and to whom one does not [32] This school of thought, like theories of organizational design and architecture [29], assumes that spatial boundaries built into workspace architecture support collaboration and collective intelligence by mitigating the effects of the cognitive constraints of the human beings working within them. We focus on the most basic set of empirical questions: what is the effect of transitioning from cubicles to open workspaces on the overall volume and type of interaction, with what implications for organizational performance based on the company’s own performance management system? In the second study, we replicate the first study’s results and consider two more-targeted empirical questions: how does spatial distance between workstations moderate the effect of transitioning from cubicles to open workspaces and how do individual employee interaction networks, both F2F and electronic, change differentially? While the first study considers interactions involving individuals, the second considers interactions for dyads (both sides of the interaction), allowing a more precise but limited investigation of the effects
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