Methodological considerations in the open-plan office paradox
What is it about?
A great deal of recent scientific research and public media attention has suggested that open-plan offices have a negative impact across a wide variety of worker outcomes, from health to satisfaction to collaboration to productivity. To the extent these findings generalizes across open-plan layouts, it has profound implications for the increasing popularity of open-plan layouts in company offices and in outsourced, serviced offices such as in the coworking industry. At the same time, the kinds of methods used to study this phenomenon clearly matter to the results and there are good reasons to suspect the methodological norms are distributed in ways that might give a misleading picture as to the general superiority of private offices over open-plan layouts. This systematic literature review examines the extent to which exisiting findings generalize or depends on specific characteristics of the office layouts or of the people using them, with a particular focus on methodological norms used in that research and on how those norms are related to the findings. Methodological considerations include which variables were studied along with a variety of other methodological choices such as whether the data included field work or surveys or experimental design or longitudinal data, among many other research choices.
Why is it important?
It turns out that (1) there is large overlap across studies with respect to which methodologies and variables have been used (most research relies entirely on surveys and very little research uses experimental design or qualitative data, for example), (2) the methods chosen have a large impact on the performance of open-plan versus private offices, with the methods least often used often showing the most promise for open-plan layouts (the one experimental study and the handful of qualitative studies reflect more positively on open-plan layouts, for example), (3) while there is wide agreement across most existing methods supporting one-person private offices over large open-plan design, there are also many plausible exceptions in understudied domains, depending on the type of more-private or more-open layout, the type of work, and the type of worker, and (5) given the relatively limited use of promising methods for exploring this topic, more research using alternative methods is needed to better understanding as to why different methods seem to have different implications for results and to when and why more-open and more-closed layouts are preferable.