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)