Sometimes, I get a little freaked out when the New York Times has stories that seem to be focused all towards issues and interests in my own life. (I’m sure that’s what all the paranoids say, but I’m way too optimistic to be a paranoid. I just think how lucky I am the NY Times caters to me!!)
In any case, this Sunday’s New York Times had a very interesting article on open cubicle floor plans that have become popular with some organizations. What I find so interesting about this topic is not the use of pink noise to drown out one’s co-workers’ conversations, but that organizational scientists have neglected the importance of the built environment in understanding employees and organizations. I know that some I/O psychologists think this is the realm of human factors, but it is not. This is the issue that Wanda Orlikowski has been trying to raise: we who study organizations need to look beyond just the social processes and incorporate the physical, built environment into our theories and research.
I don’t know what the answer is here. Though I am so interested in environmental psychology, even I don’t know what the obvious theoretical approaches would be here much less easy solutions.
Nonetheless, I would approach the study of open cubicles from the perspective of behavior setting theories. Behavior settings are a unit of analysis (bigger than a group, smaller than an organization) that can be used to understand behavior and cognitions as people interact within each other and the environment. Two other key components I think are relevant here are that behavior settings have boundaries and they have setting programs (i.e., patterns of behavior that accomplish some goal of the setting).
An accessible example would be a coffee shop. The setting program is the ordering, preparing and consumption of coffee and perhaps some food. The boundaries are the both real and psychological: the walls around the space, the coffee counter, the door to the back room. The physical objects (tables, chairs, counters, coffee makers, doors, cash registers, etc) can facilitate or hinder the setting program. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good introduction.
I think one issue with open cubicle floor plans is that there are there are likely multiple behavior settings in one space that do not have clear physical boundaries between them which affects the psychological boundaries and disrupts the enactment of the necessary setting programs for the employees to accomplish their work. I would imagine some organizations have worked to solve these problems, but others haven’t. The resulting employee frustration or work facilitation likely has to do with how much the organization has allowed or encouraged employees to modify the environment–and the work processes–to enact the setting program.
I know I do a lot of virtual research, but this would be such a fun and interesting and important study to do. Any takers!?