Putting employees in their place: the impact of hot desking on organizational and team identification.

A study of employees in the finance industry tested the propositions (a) that work team identity is more salient than organizational identity when desks are assigned, whereas organizational identity is more salient when they are not; and (b) that this is partly because physical arrangements have a significant bearing on the way in which employees engage with the organization as well as who they are most likely to engage with (i.e., impacting on the type and focus of organizational participation). The study measured levels of work team and organizational identity in matched samples of employees (N = 142) assigned to desks and not assigned (i.e., hot desked), as well as their perceptions of the use, importance, and effectiveness of electronic and face-to-face communication as indicators of different types of organizational participation. Results support the hypotheses. The perceived value of electronic communication also accounted for significant variance in organizational identification for all employees. Findings point to a number of practical implications relating to the use of hot desking in the workplace.

Key words: hot desking; space management; organizational identity; team identity; participation communication

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The organizational attachments formed by employees are of increasing interest within the contemporary workplace where, in recent years, the prospect of secure organizational membership has become increasingly remote (Rousseau 2001, Veenstra et al. 2004). One issue that has become particularly topical relates to fears that economic imperatives have created flexible but vacuous organizational entities that dislocate employees physically (through spatial and temporal decoupling) and psychologically from the workplace, fundamentally changing the way they engage with the organization (e.g., Baruch 1998, Handy 1994). Examples include an increase in the use of teleworkers (where employees work from home or from a portable office--e.g., in a car) and hot desking (where employees are not assigned dedicated desks but work from any that happen to be vacant).

Physical dislocation from the organization is strongly associated with a reliance on technological rather than face-to-face forms of communication (Huff et al. 1989, Kiesler 1997, Wiesenfeld et al. 1998). This has prompted some commentators to argue that externalizing strategies are socially marginalizing and have the capacity to undermine feelings of organizational identification and belonging (e.g., Albert et al. 2000, Caldwell and Taha 1993, Sennett 1998). Such arguments also permeate employees' anecdotal accounts of the dissociating impact of flexible office practices (e.g., Girard 1997, Greenbaum 1999, Hallowell 1998, McClelland 1998, McCurry 2001).

However, underlying these arguments are some relatively untested assumptions about how employees form their organizational attachments. These assumptions are: (a) that physical copresence is necessary to the formation and maintenance of organizational attachments and (b) that face-to-face communication is integral to the formation of organizational attachments. To our knowledge, little or no research has looked systematically at the impact of different physical arrangements on employees' organizational attachments. This matters to organizations because we know that attachments are pivotal to both the satisfaction and performance of employees (Fiol and O'Connor 2005, Haslam et al. 2003a). Accordingly, in this paper, we look directly at the potential for variation in organizational attachment as a function of desk status (desks assigned or not assigned), and attempt to develop a theoretical understanding of the psychological processes involved in these variations. In so doing, we address the question of whether physical copresence or face-to-face communication plays a role in the attachment process, and if so, when and how?

The framework surrounding our theoretical propositions begins with a conceptualization of attachment to organizations (and groups within organizations) as the product of a cognitive identification process. Here, our use of the term identification is derived from self-categorization theory, involving individuals' internalization of the norms and interests of a group as part of their self-definition (Turner et al. 1994, see also Haslam 2004, Haslam and Ellemers 2005, Van Dick et al. 2005). Until recently, attention has largely focused on identification with the organization, most commonly referred to as "organizational identification" (Ashforth and Mael 1989, Dutton et al. 1994), but it is now generally accepted that employees can and do identify strongly (if not more strongly) with work groups and teams (e.g., Van Dick 2004, Van Knippenberg and Van Schie 2000).