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Ideas in place
4.5 Discussion
We set out to investigate the impact of workplace transparency on employee’s idea sharing and idea implementation and how these relationships are moderated by workplace flexibility. We argued that in order to share and implement ideas, employees access information about their coworkers (workplace transparency), such as when they are present and what their responsibilities are. We proposed that the characteristic workplace transparency – access to visual and work-related information – would positively influence the number of ideas shared as well as how much an employee implemented ideas. We also hypothesized that these relationships are moderated by workplace flexibility, such that high levels of flexibility weaken the relationship between workplace transparency and idea sharing as well as idea implementation. We found partial support for our hypotheses. Our study indicates a (a) positive relationship of workplace transparency with idea sharing, and (b) a dampening effect of workplace flexibility on this relationship for idea sharing. Specifically, our results show that employees with high workplace transparency shared more ideas when workplace flexibility was low, and the relationship was also stronger for those with low workplace flexibility.
4.5.1 Theoretical contributions
Our contributions to the literature on workplaces and employee behavior are threefold. First, we extend the literature on open office characteristics by considering the observer’s perspective of increased access to information (transparency) instead of the observed’s perspective of decreased privacy. While we had learned a lot from previous studies about employee behaviors in open offices from the perspective of those being observed (Khazanchi et al., 2018; Sundstrom et al., 1980; Vischer, 2011), little was known about employee behaviors from the perspective of the ones who are observing. Also, by conceptualizing transparency as a workplace characteristic of open offices, we addressed the shortcoming that the potential impact of transparency on worker behaviors had been
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