The importance of office physical layout has never been studied by scholars and entrepreneurs from the perspective of managing human resources in project-based organizations (PBOs) from a managerial perspective.
This paper believes that office physical layout has great influence on organizations’ working efficiency in PBOs. With the increase of PBOs, it requires a new context for human resource management (HRM).
The paper mainly focuses on the impact of office physical layout on communication and innovation in PBOs. In the literature review part, the paper collects together relevant researches, experiments, and theoretical studies on physical layout, PBOs,communication and innovation, and finds out the gaps between the empirical situations and current theoretical studies.
Moreover, the relations between office physical layout,communications, innovation and organizational competitive advantage will be explored.The discussions and analysis are based on the premise that if people can maximize the opportunity of communication in PBOs through office physical layout, the possibility of knowledge transfer and knowledge integration, creativity and innovation will also be largely improved.
To testify this premise, we spent five months research time and focused on four companies in Sweden and took interviews with their senior managers.The paper also does comparisons with the office physical layout in PBOs and in other organizations to find out whether organization’s natures will influence its working ways and their office physical layout. The implications of the work for both future research and practice are taken into our considerations. The result of this research shows office physical layout indeed has great impact on employees’ communication, innovation and working efficiency. However, different organizations should take into their empirical conditions into consideration when designing their office physical layout.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Yue, Xiaofeng | Liang, Pei
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