Physical Enclosure, Type of Job, and Privacy in the Office

Abstract

Office employees from three job groups-including 88 secretaries, 44 bookkeepers and accountants, and 22 office managers and administrators-completed a questionnaire and had their workspaces measured for the number of partitions, the amount of floorspace, the number of people in the room, and other features. The best single predictor of rated privacy of workspaces for all job groups was the number of partitions around the workspace. Occupants of private offices rated their workspaces most private, but office managers and administrators gave higher ratings than bookkeepers and accountants, who gave higher ratings than secretaries. Results suggested that the three job groups perceived privacy differently, depending on the demands of their work and their control over contact with others. Findings are explained in terms of a three-leveled hterarchy of privacy needs.

User perceptions in workplace productivity and strategic FM delivery

“…Privacy is a key requirement of workplaces and Sundstrom et al (1982b) reported an approximately linear increase in perceived privacy with each number of enclosed sides around the workspace. Maher and von Hippel (2005), however, found that the number of partitions were not correlated with perceived privacy but they did find a positive correlation between the height of partitions and perceived privacy.…”

Collaborative knowledge work environments

“…Problems include loss of privacy, loss of confidentiality, distractions and interruptions (Sundstrom et al, 1982;Brill et al, 2001).…”

Collaboration in open-plan offices

“…Most of the attention in the past few decades has been on open-plan offices and individual cognition (e.g. Bridger & Brasher, 2011;Roper & Juneja, 2008;Sundstrom, Town, Brown, Forman, & McGee, 1982). For example, Roper and Juneja (2008) argue that open-plan offices may heighten individual arousal and improve task performance via the social facilitation effect, but may also promote cognitive overload through crowding, office noise, distractions, and interruptions.…”

“…These findings encouraged researchers to focus on social and psychological antecedences to organisational behaviour, rather than physical ones (Sutton & Rafaeli, 1987) Although the physical work environment was mostly ignored within organisational behaviour throughout the middle of the twentieth century, in the 1970s and 1980s a number of key studies were published which examined the influence of office environments on coworker relations (Oldham & Brass, 1979;Oldham & Rotchford, 1983), communication (Allen, 1977;Hatch, 1987;Sundstrom, Herbert, & Brown, 1982), satisfaction (Oldham, 1988;Sundstrom, Burt, & Kamp, 1980) and productivity (Block & Stokes, 1989;Crouch & Nimran, 1989;Sundstrom & Sundstrom, 1986). The focus of these studies was on the ways in which aspects of the physical work environment, including proximity (Monge, Rothman, Eisenberg, Miller, & Kirste, 1985), privacy (Davis & Altman, 1976;Sundstrom, Town, Brown, Forman, & McGee, 1982) and office layout (Hedge, 1982;Oldham & Brass, 1979;Zalesny & Farace, 1987) influenced employee behaviour and attitudes. These studies laid the foundations for research in the 1990s and 2000s that focused more on the symbolic (Hatch, 1993), aesthetic (Strati, 1992) and meaningful (Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004;VilnaiYavetz, Rafaeli, & Yaacov, 2005;Yanow, 1998) aspects of physical work environments, including their relationship with corporate culture (Hatch & Schultz, 1997).…”