Page 130 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Ideas in place
see workplace transparency as being central to two innovative behaviors: employees’ idea sharing (interactions to exchange ideas) and idea implementation (transformation of abstract ideas into actions) (Van de Ven, 1986). We argue that access to information about other's presence, expertise, and responsibilities will affect how often an employee seeks out another (Borgatti & Cross, 2003), in particular, to share and to implement ideas.
What is more, we need to consider the conditions under which the open office characteristic transparency relates to idea sharing and idea implementation. Companies often implement open offices in combination with workplace flexibility policies, yet they are studied separately in the literature (e.g., Boell et al., 2016; Haapakangas et al., 2018; Maher & von Hippel, 2005; Rockmann & Pratt, 2015). While we have a good understanding of how workplace flexibility affects individual and team outcomes (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; Hertel et al., 2005), it is unclear how workplace flexibility interacts with spatial characteristics of where we work, such as the transparency of open offices. Based on the proximity principle (i.e., physical closeness increases encounters), we argue that workplace flexibility moderates the relationships of workplace transparency with idea sharing and idea implementation, such that it weakens these relationships.
Taken together, the importance of the physical (work) environment for employee behavior is generally recognized (Davis et al., 2011; Davis, 1984; Elsbach & Pratt, 2007), but it is still unclear how spatial characteristics impact innovative work behaviors (Oksanen & Ståhle, 2013). Also, the current separation of open offices and workplace flexibility in previous studies represents a disparity with organizational practice (Messenger & Gschwind, 2016). To address the above concerns, we set out to study the following research question: What is the impact of perceived workplace transparency on employees’ idea sharing and idea implementation? And to what degree does workplace flexibility influence this relationship? To do so, we collected survey data at a Dutch building company (BuildCo) which had transitioned from enclosed, cell offices to an open office layout and implemented a policy enabling employees to conduct work from home.
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