Page 132 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Ideas in place
workplace transparency is crucial for studying open offices, we need to briefly revisit one of the aforementioned traditional characteristics of office: privacy, which is an “employees’ ability to control or regulate the boundary between self and others and, hence, others’ access to self, and vice versa” (Khazanchi et al., 2018, p. 594). Privacy and transparency are intimately connected and are “commonly experienced as a compromise or even violation of the other” (Bernstein, 2017, p. 220). For example, when an office is high in workplace transparency (i.e., by removing walls), it is usually low in privacy (i.e., no or little control over others’ access to oneself). Despite their relationship, privacy and transparency represent two fundamentally different perspectives. Particularly, privacy represents the perspective of the one being observed. In contrast, workplace transparency represents the perspective of the one observing4. This is a crucial difference because one can ask the same question from both standpoints yet will receive different answers. Therefore, workplace transparency – access to information (Castilla, 2015; Rosenfeld & Denice, 2015) – offers a way to capture the positive potential of open workplaces and thereby offers a different perspective on the contradictory findings.
4.2.2 Workplace transparency, idea sharing, and idea implementation
In today's economy, innovation plays a vital role in a company's success (Martins & Terblanche, 2003; Pisano, 2015) as well as in the maintenance and improvement of its functioning (Amabile et al., 2005; Janssen, 2000; Kanter, 1988; Van de Ven, 1986). This is particularly relevant as organizations adapt to the growing interrelatedness of our jobs (Khazanchi et al., 2018) and dynamics in the organization’s environment (Grant & Parker, 2009). Many new ways of working, such as open offices
4 It is necessary to note here that transparency is not equivalent to surveillance, the latter of which refers to the "constant, close and comprehensive supervision by managers" (Bernstein, 2017, p. 218). Instead, we focus on employees' perceptions; thus, it is more similar to the non-hierarchical observation that provides visual information
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