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Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future.
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Early-career engineers’ perceptions of support for innovation at the workplace – what seems to matter.
Previous research has shown the importance of contextual factors for increasing employee innovativeness, but to effectively support innovative behavior, we need to also understand what forms of support are perceived as meaningful by the employees themselves. The current study investigated the experiences of 35 early-career engineers in creating, championing and implementing new ideas at the workplace. They reported relatively few instances of support that had been experienced as helpful, and nearly all of these were related to either managerial or co-worker support. This support ranged from encouragement and positive feedback to tangible help in troubleshooting and finding resources, and, in the case of managers, providing sufficient autonomy and responsibility to enable the interviewees to pursue their ideas. Managerial support was most frequently reported by those working in self-described innovative positions, whereas co-worker support was more commonly reported by those working in selfdescribed innovative environments. Formal processes and incentives were less likely to have been perceived as helpful than informal interactions with managers and co-workers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1636442
- PAR ID:
- 10126617
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICED’19, 15.-20. Delft, The Netherlands, 5th-8th, August 2019
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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