A Study of Communication Ties Among Team Members in Work Environments

Abstract

Many organizations are rethinking and redesigning their work environments by moving out from traditional offices to shared team-spaces that promote teamwork and collaboration. This study explores communication ties in co-working spaces through a comparative study on Jordanian workplaces and their U.S. counterparts. The study employed spatial analysis and a social network survey to examine empirically the effects of spatial variables (distance and co-visibility) and team members’ communication characteristics (communication-based on gender and role) on the frequency of employees’ face-to-face and electronic-based communications. Correlations and variance analyses indicated that the frequency of communication between two team members’ declines with the increase of distance between their work locations and increases with the increase of local visual accessibility between them. In a culture characterized by an obvious social hierarchy like Jordan, the frequency of communication among team members with the same role and the same gender was higher than the frequency of communication among team members with different roles or gender.