Impact Of Open Plan Office Management On Organizational Members And Collaboration

Theoretical Framework

This research report provides a detailed review of open plan office management. The purpose of the report is to evaluate the impact of open plan office management on organization and the employees. It is observed that open plan office could create a positive influence on the organizational members but in many cases, the employees react differently because they might not accept initially. Thus, this research report discusses how open plan office create impact on the organization as a whole.

The organization usually starts operation by developing a traditional design of office and the problem occurs when the organization applies the change and create an open plan office environment. Some employees may accept the transformation while some may stand against the initiative and there is a limited percentage of people who may initially refuse but with the flow of operation, they may accept the change. However, it is also identified that leadership plays a great role in managing the operation and the resistance to change. This mean if an organizations has effective leadership style, the open plan office can effectively be managed.

This section of the report provides an in-depth analysis of brand and service quality marketing. The analysis has been conducted by considering the findings found in the previous studies. I order to conduct the analysis, almost 15 journals on open plan office management have been selected. In order to review the business problems, situated cognition theory has been discussed in the analysis. The organizational theory and other related theory have stated that open plan office are usually associated with the controversy, paradox and some unintended consequence. Likewise, some other important fats have been discussed in the flowing review of existing papers.

Shafaghat et al. (2014) defined that physical work environment as the process which consist of all physical objectives that employees could experience in an organizations. On the other side, Hatch (2017) defined open plan office as one kind of physical work environment. Hence, Hongisto et al. (2016) mentioned that open plan office are usually the shared rooms where the desks are placed in freely in a groups. For example, the small office are usually occupied by 4 to 9 people and likewise, the medium plan-office have space for 10 to 24 employee. It is identified that open plan office could incorporate challenges between the desks that could further vary from waist to neck height have they do not extend all the way from the floor to the celling. In addition, the employees in the open plan office could share the amenities like the printers, photocopies

Empirical Analysis

With respect to empirical research, there have been some empirical studies that particularly examines the relationship between the open office and collaboration. Haapakangas et al. (2014) argued that most of the studies on open plan office pay attention to the individual outcome like the performance, satisfaction and wellbeing instead of on team process which is just like the collaboration. On the other side the review of a research conducted by Bodin Danielsson et al. (2014), show that when the authors have studied collaboration some related behaviours such as interaction, communication and coordination, which means they did not discover any clear relationship between the particular features of physical work environment and some isolated behaviour. One of this major reasons or factors of this mixed findings is that open plan office studies mainly conceptualized with how much or how satisfied, the employees are with the communication in their open plan office.

The major problems with paying attention on collaboration as the result is that it usually avoids both content and the context of communication. In addition, Shafaghat et al. (2015) mentioned that employees in open plan office could communicate on a more frequent basis. However, Waber,  Magnolfi and Lindsay (2014) argued that this could be in the form of conflict regarding the limited space as well as the resource. Therefore, in general sense, it is worth mentioning thin that the authors should understand such sort of interaction  can be facilitated in open plan office before anybody could anticipate the influence of open layout on team result outcome. Nieuwenhuis et al (2014) identified that four different types of tat vary with respect to the form and functions and such office are the cell office, the shared room office and other combi office. So, from the previous studies and some principles of theories help to ascertain that open plan office can be of different types and they are designed and used as the way situation demands.

In the relationship between “open plan office” and collaboration, the theory of situated cognition has been presented here rather than focusing on the conventional sense. Tenenberg and Knobelsdorf (2014) defined “situated cognition” as set of assumptions regarding the cognition that could compete the traditional concept of cognition which is typically restricted to the internal state of mind. Hence, Myachykov et al. (2014) argued that a proper definition of cognition could require an understanding of the interplay between the structure behaviour and some environmental structure resource instead of an isolated research of individual cognition functions like the memory and learning outcome. Thus, on the basis of functional assumptions of “situated cognition”, it can be mentioned that the cognition cannot remain confined to the skills and skull; however, it remains as the platforms that includes physical environment, human behaviour and social environment.

Qualitative Data Analysis

So, it is worth stating that situated cognition theory is relevant to present research context. Especially, it is more relevant in the association between “open plan office” and collaboration as it explains how social context allow collective actions to reveal the fact. Since situated cognition theory emerges from a set of special discipline, as the interpretation made by the scholars could differ. In this context, Dai, Lan and Lian (2014) mentioned a few aspects of situated cognition theory considering few principles of psychology and they rather pay attention on cognition as the socially situated. So, it becomes easy to understand physical context. From the definition of such theory implies that, the authors need a full account of human cognition which should incorporate social and physical context as well as the mental state of mind. However, the authors of previous studies should understand the phenomenon such as the decision-making, memory and learning.

Qualitative Analysis:

 The qualitative data analysis is usually referred to non-numeric data and information such as interview transcripts, notes, audio and video recording and other text documents. As put forward by Lewis (2015), qualitative data analysis can be of different process and thereby they are divided into the following categories.

Content analysis: This is referred to the action of dividing verbal or behaviour data to categorize, summarize as well as tabulate the data content (Taylor, Bogdan and DeVault 2015).

Narrative Analysis: Such technique could involve the reformulation of different stories presented by the respondent considering the context of each case and different experience of each respondent (Haberman 2014).

Discourse course analysis: This is particularly a technique of analysis which takes place through natural talk as well as all types of written text.

However, for the present research context, content analysis method has been applied to conduct the analysis because content analysis method considers the technique of verbal and behavioural data such as interview.

In order to conduct the analysis both primary and secondary data collection method have been applied. In order to conduct the review of the literature, the secondary data has been collected from secondary sources such as books, journals articles, newspaper articles etc. On the other side, the primary data has been collected by conducting interview among the employees of the organizations who work under an open plan office environment. Particularly, the interview has been conducted among five employees falling under different age group. The respondents for interview have been chosen on the basis of simple random sampling method.

Findings

Findings

Topic or themes of the interview	Findings	Summarizing
Are you happy in your job?	It is identified that some employees have mentioned that they are actually liking the change in the workplace environment while some employees presently are not happy with the change because they say that working in place where they have to stand whole day is not just acceptable	It can be mentioned that any change in the office environment should be based on the opinions of the employees because the employees are the people who remain in the workplace till the end of the day. So, therefore, before designing the desk or the workplace, the organization should consider the opinion of the employees.
How have the changes at work affected you and the office in general?	Hence, some of the employees have mentioned that they are liking the work environment because, as it has now become a bit entertaining that it was before. In addition, some employees have mentioned that it has become pretty interesting as now they can see their bosses working at the same floor.	It is true that open plan office can create a positive impact on the people because the chances of communication increases. Moreover, when the leaders and the genera employees work in the same office floor, it is certain that employee and manger relationship tends to strengthen.
Is there anything else that you would like us to know?	Hence, some employees have mentioned that it is good to initiate the change but there could be more better ways of doing things , while	When designing open office plan, it is necessary for the organizations to apply innovation to the existing concept of open plan office.

Table 1: Findings and summary

Recommendation and Conclusion

In spite of the barrier to chance encounters generated by physical and organizational context of the plan, the interview indicates that some of the employees could experience an ongoing collaborative relationship. On the basis of the conversation and interview data and the construction of situated theory there is a relationship between employee behaviour and open plan office and it can be mentioned that employee behaviour is not influenced by environment,; rather the interaction helps to shape employee behaviour. In addition, it can also stated that building provides space, where employees might have personal encounters with others from different organizations and there are some physical features that could constrain the interaction between the employees.

However, open plan office can further be modified that by including some particular behavioural elements such as communicating and formal interaction. This means when designing open plan office, the organization must have to think of healthy state of the workplace. The environment should not be developed in a way that affect the mind of other employee. The human resource department of the organisations needs to think of the fact that, some people in the workplace could be introvert or shy; they might not prefer to work in an environment where people from other desk can see the work. In addition to this, supervisors or the managers may feel the lack of privacy when they are supposed to take any formal business designs.

References

Bodin Danielsson, C., Chungkham, H.S., Wulff, C. and Westerlund, H., 2014. Office design’s impact on sick leave rates. Ergonomics, 57(2), pp.139-147.

Dai, C., Lan, L. and Lian, Z., 2014. Method for the determination of optimal work environment in office buildings considering energy consumption and human performance. Energy and Buildings, 76, pp.278-283.

Haapakangas, A., Hongisto, V., Hyönä, J., Kokko, J. and Keränen, J., 2014. Effects of unattended speech on performance and subjective distraction: The role of acoustic design in open-plan offices. Applied Acoustics, 86, pp.1-16.

Haberman, S.J., 2014. Analysis of qualitative data: Introductory topics. Academic Press.

Hatch, M.J., 2017. The symbolics of office design: an empirical exploration. In Symbols and artifacts (pp. 129-146). Routledge.

Hongisto, V., Haapakangas, A., Varjo, J., Helenius, R. and Koskela, H., 2016. Refurbishment of an open-plan office–environmental and job satisfaction. Journal of environmental psychology, 45, pp.176-191.

Lewis, S., 2015. Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Health promotion practice, 16(4), pp.473-475.

Myachykov, A., Scheepers, C., Fischer, M.H. and Kessler, K., 2014. TEST: a tropic, embodied, and situated theory of cognition. Topics in cognitive science, 6(3), pp.442-460.

Nieuwenhuis, M., Knight, C., Postmes, T. and Haslam, S.A., 2014. The relative benefits of green versus lean office space: Three field experiments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20(3), p.199.

Shafaghat, A., Keyvanfar, A., Lamit, H., Mousavi, A. and Majid, M.Z.A., 2014. Open plan office design features affecting staff’s health and well-being status. Jurnal Teknologi (Sciences & Engineering), 70(7), pp.83-8.

Shafaghat, A., Keyvanfar, A., Ferwati, M.S. and Alizadeh, T., 2015. Enhancing staff’s satisfaction with comfort toward productivity by sustainable Open Plan Office Design. Sustainable Cities and Society, 19, pp.151-164.

Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.

Tenenberg, J. and Knobelsdorf, M., 2014. Out of our minds: a review of sociocultural cognition theory. Computer Science Education, 24(1), pp.1-24.

Waber, B., Magnolfi, J. and Lindsay, G., 2014. Workspaces that move people. Harvard Business Review, 92(10), pp.68-77.