Collaborative work, team boundaries, and workspace design: the proximity-privacy paradox in an open-plan office environment

Workplace collaboration, interdependent work, is an intellectually intense and highly social endeavor suggesting that some collaborative activities are more effective face-to-face ‘in person’, within the office environment. To foster and enhance collaborative work, organisations have focused their efforts on creating collaborative workplaces, with the expectation that workplace management models combined with design features will encourage employees to build relationships and share their knowledge and expertise. Utilising team boundary theory the study looks at the paradox between proximity, the degree of physical closeness between employees and teams, and their need for privacy in an open-plan office that operates a combination workplace management strategy – allocated desks and hot-desking. The results reveal that boundary behaviours within-teams and across the six teams in the one business unit studied varied. The team with a highly specialised knowledge and skill base, under constant pressure to mitigate information leakage in their business dealings, relied on within-team collaboration. They preferred to work together from clustered banks of allocated workstations in an area of the office that they considered to be ‘theirs’. The hot-desking arrangements for the three teams that had a shared knowledge base and complicated skill set did encourage knowledge sharing, mainly through brief interactions and impacted their perceptions of who is in the ‘team’. The results also highlight design features that make workspace fit-for-purpose and those that create barriers to collaboration.