The Science of Success: In this series, we’ll scan the latest scientific, academic, and professional literature, looking at everything from psychology to physics to bring you new insights on how to be more successful.
Want to change your management style? Looking to treat your employees ethically? In search of a way to make sure everyone in the office is happy and more productive? Achieving all these goals, a new study found, may be as simple as moving your desk.
Having conducted five workplace studies involving 400 participants, as well as gathered data from business students and others in the workforce, researchers at Britain’s Cambridge University and Holland’s Erasmus University discovered a clear correlation between the location of your desk and the state of your spirit.
Middle managers who sat very close to abusive bosses, for example, weren’t only unhappy, but also likely to mimic their supervisors’ bad behavior and repeat the same poor patterns with their own employees. Middle managers subjected to equally horrible bosses, but blessed with some distance from their supervisors, however, were still miserable at the office but much more likely to treat their own staff fairly and kindly.
“We demonstrate that higher level management unfairness can have detrimental effects throughout the organization and it is passed down from high management to middle management, but only if the spatial and social distance is low,” said Dr. Gijs van Houwelingen, the study’s co-author. “Managers at all levels in any organization need to strike a balance between a certain sense of closeness to ensure efficiency and some sense of distance to ensure that negative top-level behavior does not spread unhindered through all layers of the organization.”
The study’s findings may sound banal; that mid-level employees would aspire to imitate their superiors, even if their superiors are behaving inappropriately, is hardly a stunning insight into human behavior. What is new, however, is just how prominent actual physical proximity is in determining behavioral patterns. As open floor plans and other office structures are being debated and experimented with, and as telecommuting becomes a more prevalent feature in the weekly routines of more and more Americans—by one estimate, 3.2 million Americans, or nearly 3 percent of the workforce, now work exclusively from home, and many others work remotely on occasion—any study of workplace geography and its implications on productivity is crucial.
Might bad bosses, for example, do less damage if their employees aren’t physically there by their sides to soak up the abuse? And will great bosses be less effective the further away they are?
The new study out of Cambridge and Erasmus seems to suggest that may be the case. There’s clearly much more work to be done on this front, but meanwhile, go ahead and move that desk around a little bit; it could only do you good.