One
of my very earliest posts here talked about Lovaglia’s Law. Michael
Lovaglia, a Professor and Department Chair in the Sociology Department at
the Iowa, proposed this hypothesis to Jeff Pfeffer and me in email last year:
Lovaglia’s Law: The more important the
outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it.
I
suggested back then that the law may hold because, the more important a
decision is, the more political behavior and unbridled-self interest is
provoked. Plus there is also evidence that when a decision is framed as “big,” the associated anxiety, anger, passion and
related strong emotions lead to cognitive narrowing by all parties, and thus some
decision-making biases become even more pronounced.
I
was reminded of the law this week as a result of a discussion that I was having
with some colleagues about the trade-offs between open and closed office
designs. I thought of Lovaglia’s Law
because there is now so much faith in the wonders of open office designs. Yet I wonder if many of these decisions to put people in open offices are made
despite rather than because of the evidence. There are certainly places where open office designs make sense, like labs and other settings where intensive
collaboration and “visual” contact with colleagues helps the work move along. Indeed, much of the Stanford d.school is open, which works
well for our teaching and intensive teamwork (although I notice that, the
longer we are in our flexible d.school building — where people are constantly prototyping the space — the more that
the spaces occupied by folks who spend day after day there look like closed
offices). Also, administrators and
accountants usually like open offices because they cost less to build, furnish,
heat, and cool – so they are motivated to make arguments that people will like
open designs better and work more effectively in them.
BUT
the best evidence I can find tells a much different story. It turns out that although there is a lot of
hype from companies that sell open office furniture and related goods about how
fantastic open offices are, and all that, research published in peer review
journals clashes with the hype. In every
study that I can find that has survived the peer review process, people in open
settings are found to be less satisfied, less productive, and experience more
stress than people who work in closed offices. And when people move from closed to open offices, they like them less,
report being less productive, and report more stress. So long as people are doing work that is
largely “individual” and that requires thinking and intense individual
concentration, these findings make a lot of sense to me.
Yet,
as Lovaglia’s Law predicts, many administrators and
building designers seem to be have a hard time “hearing” such evidence and keep
pushing for open office designs – they prefer to talk about selected anecdotes
instead. Indeed, there are popular articles on how
management can overcome such “irrational” resistance to change. But those articles don’t seem to mention
that, at least for people who don’t do highly interdependent team based work
such as is done in engineering and scientific labs, open offices don’t appear
to work very well, So such resistance to
open offices might, in fact, be rational.
I spent a bit of time reviewing this research
today. I am not done, but from what I can tell –- although many of the studies
could be stronger and more research is needed –- the evidence that we have thus
far is remarkably consistent. To give you a taste, here are abstracts of articles
showing that moving to an open office is associated with dissatisfaction and motivation. An especially counter-intuitive study by Mary Jo Hatch of workers in
high-tech companies shows that the more physical barriers there are between
employees (including doors), THE MORE interaction that takes place between them.
And, turning specifically to academic
settings, a study of 100 faculty and 356 students
at a community college by Franklin Becker and his colleagues found that “Faculty in open-private
offices reported significantly more difficulty working efficiently
and concentrating. Both faculty and students reported that faculty
were less available in open-private as compared to closed-private
offices, and both groups reported that the quality of performance
feedback either given or received suffered in the open plan compared
to traditional shared or single-occupancy offices.” Also, here is a New York Times
article that talks about Gloria Mark’s research on how it takes about 25
minutes for the average worker to return to as task after being interrupted –
and there is good reason to believe that interruptions will happen far more
often in open than in closed offices from existing research.
I
will keep reading the literature. But I
also suspect that, since most of this research was published (In the 1980s and
1990s), a higher proportion of people with jobs that require time to think and
intense concentration are now put in open offices, or semi-open offices
(especially cubicles, ala Dilbert). There
also might be generational differences here: perhaps young people expect to work
in open settings and like them more than old baby boomers like me.
I would appreciate
any comments that people have about their experiences with different office
arrangements. For now, I will assume
that Lovaglia’s Law explains the widespread and
apparently growing move toward open office design, but I am happy to listen to
alternative views. I have a
strong bias against open offices at the moment, but it is weakly held (to paraphrase
from the folks at the Institute for the Future, who encourage people to have strong opinions, that are weakly held)
