| Title |
Effects of Workplace Design Features on Task and Social Group Cohesiveness |
| Keywords |
Designated Shared Space ; Enclosure ; Flexibility ; Task Group Cohesiveness ; Social Ggroup Cohesiveness |
| Abstract |
The workplace environment has rapidly evolved in response to changing technologies, organizational contexts, demographic changes, etc. Open offices with panel based systems have often provided rigid workspaces, which are insufficient to support growing needs of collaborative activities and individual activities simultaneously. Flexible workplace strategy has been emphasized to increase informal communication and collaborative works, and to contribute to group cohesiveness without sacrificing individual works and privacy. The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of physical environmental features such as existence of a designated shared space for a team, and flexible arrangement of workstation, movable office systems, and openness/accessibility for individual workstation, on group cohesiveness. Questionnaire items were developed for this study. Questionnaires were distributed to office employees working in manufacturing corporate in Michigan, U.S.A. Usable 384 questionnaire were analyzed for this study using SPSS 12. Site visits were also conducted.
Employees who work in a team are likely to have higher task group cohesiveness. Participants who have a designated shared space have higher social group cohesiveness than people who do not have one. The degree of enclosure of the designated shared space is positively related to social group cohesiveness. However, the degree of enclosure is not related to task group cohesiveness. The results found that flexible work environmental features are positively related to task group cohesiveness but not to social group cohesiveness. Different from expectation, openness and accessibility were not significantly related to either task group cohesiveness or social group cohesiveness. |