Page 90 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Reconfiguring workplaces
Parker, 2009). Moreover, while we know a great deal about how co-located and distributed work impact employee behaviors, we know much less about the workplace implications for relational outcomes (Khazanchi et al., 2018; Rockmann & Pratt, 2015). Given that one can best observe a phenomenon of interest under conditions of change, we ask: How do workplace configurations shape work relationships, and how do employees cope with changes to their workplace configurations?
To answer these questions, we investigated a European subsidiary of a global technology company that made the radical decision to close their corporate office temporarily while continuing 'business as usual'2. We collected interview data as well as videos and documents from the time of the closure. We carefully examined how the closure (the loss of the central office from their workplace configuration) affected work relationships.
We contribute threefold to the literature on contemporary workplaces and work relationships. First, our findings extend the research in the area of work relationships by introducing the notion of relationship layers and providing empirical insights into how workplace configurations shape these different layers (Heaphy et al., 2018; Khazanchi et al., 2018). Second, we broaden our current understanding of contemporary workplaces (e.g., Bernstein & Turban, 2018; Gandini, 2015; Hislop & Axtell, 2009; Kossek et al., 2015) as we introduce the concept of workplace configurations, their dimensions and show how different contemporary work settings relate to each other. Third, and last, we contribute to the literature on the link between place and relationships (Heaphy et al., 2018; Khazanchi et al., 2018). We detail how workers cope with a change in their workplace configuration by reconfiguring around new physical and digital centers to maintain and create work relationships.
In the remainder of the paper, we first provide a brief review of
2 The similarity with the situation during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is coincidental because the decision at TechSub was already made in 2017.
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