Page 138 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Ideas in place
traditional, closed offices to an open office (a transparency-creating change to the physical setup) as well as a new policy enabling employees to conduct work from home. The policy enabled employees to choose their work locations (including working from home). A research assistant working in the company approached the HR manager to discuss BuildCo’s participation in our research study. Then, a draft of the survey was sent to the HR manager to ensure that it would comply with their privacy regulations. After approval by BuildCo's management, we agreed that all employees would receive the questionnaire via email from our contact person at BuildCo. The email to the employees stated the purpose (studying the new offices), a guarantee of confidentiality (Podsakoff et al., 2003), and an anonymized link.
The survey was sent to 2363 employees across four BuildCo locations, from whom we received 1068 responses. After deleting incomplete responses and no variance responses, we had a final sample of 368 respondents (usable response rate: 15.6%). The sample consisted of 75% male respondents, which is representative of the construction company. On average, our participants were 36.3 years (SD = 10.81), worked 44.3 (SD = 7.74) hours per week, and 83.7% had a full-time contract.
4.3.2 Measures
The workplace transparency and idea implementation scales were measured on the 5-point Likert scale, with 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree), whereas workplace flexibility and idea sharing were measured as count variables. To provide the survey to the respondents in their native language (Dutch), all items were translated from English to Dutch by a native speaker (research assistant), then double-checked and translated back by the principal researcher. Also, our contact person at the company read the questions to ensure readability, as well as to remove any technical jargon and unfamiliar words (Peterson, 2000).
Transparency (WTRANS) measures are scarce because transparency is often considered an "elusive" concept (Bernstein, 2017, p.
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