Page 188 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Summary
affordances of nomadic work: malleability, privacy, and instant sociality. Also, I conduct a comparison of typical places in nomadic work along those affordances indicated that we need to broaden our understanding of the concept ‘workplace’. These findings demonstrate that – paradoxically – when studying location-independent work, it is essential to take place into account. Also, my findings emphasize that workplaces are not predetermined but rather emerge from the interactions of the worker with the environment.
In the second study (chapter 3), I examine how a workplace configuration – an individual worker’s arrangement of workplaces in a particular combination – shapes their work relationships, and particularly how employees cope with a radical change to their workplace configuration. I investigate this through a qualitative study at a global technology company which decided to close its corporate office temporarily while continuing business as usual. I find that when employees changed from a co-located to a distributed setting, their closest relationships intensified, whereas their more removed relationships diluted. However, through interviews and video data, I also find that they cope with the loss of the office by reconfiguring around new physical and digital centers. These findings demonstrate that when studying the impact of places on relational outcomes, it is essential to take a broader perspective beyond a single work location and account for the difference between relationship layers.
In the third study (chapter 4), I tested the relationship between the office characteristic of workplace transparency and innovative behaviors. Open offices are characterized by transparency, but the literature on open- plan offices has primarily treated this spatial characteristic as context. I propose to draw on the concept of transparency (access to work-related information) to better capture how this spatial characteristic of the open office affects innovative work behavior (i.e., idea sharing and idea implementation). I hypothesize that access to information (workplace transparency) about other worker's presence, behavior, expertise, and responsibilities is central to worker’s idea sharing (interactions to exchange
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