Page 131 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Ideas in place
With this study, we contribute to the literature on the physical environment of organizations, specifically about the workplace characteristic transparency and its effect on innovative employee behaviors. First, we conceptualize transparency as a characteristic of open offices and extend previous research on workplaces, which has treated transparency as the context (e.g., Bernstein & Turban, 2018; Oldham & Brass, 1979; Zalesny & Farace, 1987). Second, we take the first step towards a measure of workplace transparency, while so far, transparency has rarely been measured (Bernstein, 2017). Lastly, we demonstrate the moderating role of workplace flexibility for these relationships, extending our understanding of how new ways of working interact with each other.
In the rest of this paper, we start by giving a brief overview of recent work on transparency in open offices and workplace flexibility that provides a starting point for our analysis. We then outline the methodology for gathering and analyzing data on the variables at BuildCo. Following this, we provide the results of our statistical analysis, where we tested the relationship between workplace transparency and innovative behaviors with workplace flexibility as a moderator. Finally, we discuss the findings and directions for future research.
4.2 Theory and hypotheses 4.2.1 Workplace transparency
An open office is an office that lacks dividing boundaries, such as walls or partitions, are large rooms containing a great number of workers, often with individual workstation groups (Brennan et al., 2002; Brunia et al., 2016). Typically, the literature describes offices based on the characteristics of proximity, workplace assignment, privacy, and crowding when studying their effect on employee behavior (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007; Khazanchi et al., 2018). However, transparency is an important yet understudied characteristic of workplaces. Transparency is defined as access to information (Castilla, 2015; Rosenfeld & Denice, 2015). To understand why
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