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General discussion
along these dimensions. The change also acted as a catalysator for a typical challenge in semispatial settings where people have considerable freedom of movement: coordination. Specifically, it crystallized that employee’s implicit understanding of work organization was disturbed as colleague’s whereabouts were more opaque and new workplaces were incorporated into their repertory (e.g., coworking space).
When confronted with this change, they coped by aligning people’s presence in digital and physical places. That is, for example, by turning typically dispersed places into co-located workplaces (e.g., home office for teamwork) and relying more strongly on recurring meetings in digital spaces. Similarly, the study in chapter 4 demonstrated that being physically present in a place with others increases employee’s idea sharing, which is important for knowledge workers. Overall, the findings indicate that workers interact with contemporary workplaces and see each workplace as an element of a bigger configuration across which people need to come together. In the future, scholars could turn their focus to the peripheral relationships that I found to be affected most strongly by the loss of a central office. In particular, while there is some research on avoiding serendipitous encounters (e.g., Irving et al., 2019), there is more research needed on the serendipitous encounters of coworkers who do not know each other yet – and what the implications are for individual and organizational outcomes. A social network perspective may offer insights into what the effect is of a change to a workplace configuration on relationship strength.
5.1.3 Sedentary setting: Transparency helps to share ideas in a shared office
From the focus on workers moving between different places, I turned to workers in a shared workplace in chapter 4. In the last empirical chapter, I tested whether the spatial characteristic workplace transparency relates to innovative worker behaviors of idea sharing and idea implementation. In doing so, I also took into account that workers can be remote to each other to varying degrees, as they work in a shared office, at
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