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Ideas in place
shares unique information (Stasser & Birchmeier, 2003) such as ideas. Hence, we hypothesize that workplace transparency will affect the amount of idea sharing positively:
H1. Workplace transparency will be positively related to idea sharing.
Besides sharing ideas with coworkers, it is also crucial for companies that employees implement ideas in order to remain successful (Martins & Terblanche, 2003; Pisano, 2015). We conceptualize idea implementation based on a subset of the broader innovative work behaviors by Scott and Bruce (1994), such that idea implementation concerns promoting ideas, securing the necessary resources, and developing plans to transform abstract ideas into actions. To implement ideas, employees need to have information that is not limited to formal roles but also about, amongst others, who is responsible for budgets, most capable of championing ideas, and in which projects they are involved. Workplace transparency means to have access to information on top of what is known through an organization's formal structure. Formal structures define responsibilities of a particular role, whereas informal structures develop around, amongst others, physical locations (Scott, 1961). Studies have shown that informal and formal structures can but do not necessarily have to overlap (Gulati & Puranam, 2009). Thus, the open office characteristic transparency means that employees have more access to visual and task information. In highly transparent offices, employees can observe the interactions and behaviors that take place (informal) in addition to those that should take place (formal). Thereby, employees are better able to develop plans to make their idea actionable based on the knowledge of others’ responsibilities and when to talk to them. Hence, similar to idea sharing, we argue that access to information, in other words, visual and task transparency, increases employee's idea implementing behavior:
H2. Workplace transparency will be positively related to idea implementation.
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