The classical management viewpoint emphasized

Major Questions You Should Be Able to Answer

2.1 Evolving Viewpoints: How We Got to Today’s Management Outlook Major Question: What’s the payoff in studying different management perspectives, both yesterday’s and today’s?

2.2 Classical Viewpoint: Scientific & Administrative Management Major Question: If the name of the game is to manage work more efficiently, what can the classical viewpoint teach me?

2.3 Behavioral Viewpoint: Behaviorism, Human Relations, & Behavioral Science Major Question: To understand how people are motivated to achieve, what can I learn from the behavioral viewpoint?

2.4 Quantitative Viewpoints: Management Science & Operations Management Major Question: If the manager’s job is to solve problems, how might the two quantitative approaches help?

2.5 Systems Viewpoint Major Question: How can the exceptional manager be helped by the systems viewpoint?

2.6 Contingency Viewpoint Major Question: In the end, is there one best way to manage in all situations?

2.7 Quality-Management Viewpoint

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Major Question: Can the quality-management viewpoint offer guidelines for true managerial success?

2.8 The Learning Organization in an Era of Accelerated Change Major Question: Organizations must learn or perish. How do I build a learning organization?

the manager’s toolbox Mind-sets: How Do You Go about Learning? Learn or die. Isn’t that the challenge to us as individuals? Throughout your career, your success will depend on your constantly being a learner, making choices about how to solve various problems—which tools to apply, including the theories we will describe in this chapter. However, one barrier to learning that all of us need to be aware of is our mind-set.

The Enemy of Learning By the time we are grown, the minds of many of us have become set in patterns of thinking, the result of our personal experiences and various environments, that affect how we respond to new ideas. These mind-sets determine what ideas we think are important and what ideas we ignore.

Because we can’t pay attention to all the events that occur around us, say the authors of a book on critical analysis, “our minds filter out some observations and facts and let others through to our conscious awareness.”1 Herein lies the danger: “As a result, we see and hear what we subconsciously want to and pay little attention to facts or observations that have already been rejected as unimportant.”

Having mind-sets makes life comfortable. However, as the foregoing writers point out, “Familiar relationships and events become so commonplace that we expect them to continue forever. Then we find ourselves completely unprepared to accept changes that are necessary even when they stare us in the face.”2

What’s Your Mind-set? Two Views What will be your approach to studying management theory (or anything else in this book)? If you can’t “get it” right away, will you take that as a reflection on your basic intelligence—that you’re somehow deficient, that people will think you’re dumb and you’ll feel like a loser?

Based on 20 years of research, Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck suggests that the view you adopt about yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life—including how you learn. In our views of ourselves, she says, most of us have either a fixed mind-set or a growth mind-set.3

• The fixed mind-set—believing your basic qualities are carved in stone. People with a fixed mind-set are concerned about how they will be judged, as on intelligence or personal qualities. They believe “My intelligence is something very basic that can’t be changed very much.” Or, “I’m a certain kind of person, and there’s not much that can be done to change that.” They care less about learning than looking bad when failure occurs.

• The growth mind-set—believing your basic qualities can be changed through your effort. People with a growth mind-set are concerned with improving. They think, “You can always change your intelligence quite

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a bit.” Or, “You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.” Failure for these kinds of people may well feel bad, but instead of hiding their deficiencies from others they try to overcome them. Fortunately, by applying themselves, people of a fixed mind-set can develop a growth mind-set.

For Discussion Your approach to learning won’t stop once you leave school. As we discuss at the end of this chapter, most organizations now are “learning organizations,” in which employees are continually required to expand their ability to achieve results by obtaining the right knowledge and changing their behavior. Thus, your mind-set matters. Which type are you? What can a person begin to do to move from a fixed mind-set to a growth mind-set?

This chapter gives you a short overview of the three principal historical perspectives or viewpoints on management —classical, behavioral, and quantitative. It then describes the three principal contemporary viewpoints—systems, contingency, and quality-management. Finally, we consider the concept of learning organizations.

Evolving Viewpoints: How We Got to Today’s Management Outlook What’s the payoff in studying different management perspectives, both yesterday’s and today’s?

THE BIG PICTURE After studying theory, managers may learn the value of bringing rationality to the decision- making process. This chapter describes two principal theoretical perspectives—the historical and the contemporary. Studying management theory provides understanding of the present, a guide to action, a source of new ideas, clues to the meaning of your managers’ decisions, and clues to the meaning of outside events.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Peter Drucker said. The purpose of this book is, to the extent possible, to give you the tools to create your own future in your

career and as a manager.

Creating Modern Management: The Handbook of Peter Drucker Who is Peter Drucker? “He was the creator and inventor of modern management,” says management guru Tom Peters (author of In Search of Excellence). “In the early 1950s, nobody had a tool kit to manage these incredibly complex organizations that had gone out of control. Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that.”4

An Austrian trained in economics and international law, Drucker came to the United States in 1937, where

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he worked as a correspondent for British newspapers and later became a college professor. In 1954, he published his famous text The Practice of Management, in which he proposed that management was one of the major social innovations of the 20th century and that it should be treated as a profession, like medicine or law. In this and other books, he introduced several ideas that now underlie the organization and practice of management—that workers should be treated as assets, that the corporation could be considered a human community, that there is “no business without a customer,” that institutionalized management practices were preferable to charismatic cult leaders.

Many ideas that you will encounter in this book—decentralization, management by objectives, knowledge workers—are directly traceable to Drucker’s pen. “Without his analysis,” says one writer, “it’s almost impossible to imagine the rise of dispersed, globe-spanning corporations.”5 In our time, Drucker’s rational approach has culminated in evidence-based management, as we describe in Section 2.6 in this chapter.

True learner. In his 70-year career, Peter Drucker published over 35 books and numerous other publications, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and achieved near rock-star status for his management ideas, which influenced organizations from General Electric to the Girl Scouts. A true learner who constantly expanded his knowledge, he understood that new experiences are key to nurturing new ideas and new ventures. Do you have this kind of curiosity?

Six Practical Reasons for Studying This Chapter “Theory,” say business professors Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, “often gets a bum rap among managers because it’s associated with the word ‘theoretical,’ which connotes ‘impractical.’ But it shouldn’t.”6 After all, what could be more practical than studying different approaches to see which work best?

Indeed, there are six good reasons for studying theoretical perspectives: 1. Understanding of the present. “Sound theories help us interpret the present, to understand what is

happening and why,” say Christensen and Raynor.7 Understanding history will help you understand why some practices are still favored, whether for right or wrong reasons.

2. Guide to action. Good theories help us make predictions and enable you to develop a set of principles that will guide your actions.

3. Source of new ideas. It can also provide new ideas that may be useful to you when you come up against new situations.

4. Clues to meaning of your managers’ decisions. It can help you understand your firm’s focus, where the top managers are “coming from.”

5. Clues to meaning of outside events. It may allow you to understand events outside the organization that could affect it or you.

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EXAMPLE

6. Producing positive results. It can help you understand why certain management practices—such as setting goals that stretch you to the limit (stretch goals), basing compensation and promotion on performance, and monitoring results—have been so successful for many firms.8

Pages from a Game Company’s Employee Guide In Flatness Lies Greatness:

If Management 1.0 is what we’re used to now, with its traditional pyramid hierarchy, what would Management 2.0 look like? What if, as management thinker Gary Hamel suggests, Management 2.0 looked a lot like Web 2.0 as represented in Wikipedia, YouTube, and other online communities?9 Could the traditional hierarchy of boxes with lines actually become a corporate straitjacket?

Is Hierarchy Overrated? Bellevue, Washington–based Valve Corp. is an online entertainment and technology company that has created several award-winning games (Half Life, Portal) as well as Steam, an online gaming platform. Its staff consists of (1) all the employees and (2) a founder/president—who is not a manager. In fact, “we don’t have any management,” says Valve’s employee handbook, “and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else.”10

In other words, Valve is a flat organization, defined as one with few or no levels of management (as we discuss further in Chapter 8). Indeed, Valve is the flattest of flat organizations because for an employee, says the handbook, it “removes every organizational barrier between your work and the customer enjoying that work.”

Desks with Wheels. Not only do Valve employees have no managers, but they get to select which projects they want to work on, have the power to green-light (approve) new projects, and even ship finished products. Every employee’s desk has wheels, serving two purposes. “The first is a symbolic reminder that one should always consider where they could move to be more valuable,” says one account. “The other is literal—team members often move their desks close together when working on a project.”11 Instead of managers, Valve relies on rotating team leaders (called “group contributors”), who change according to each project.

YOUR CALL The basic reason Valve has no formal managers is that it wants to attract the best talent and produce outstanding products year after year. Clearly, the flat structure works very well for Valve—as it does for other organizations, profit and not-for-profit alike, that operate in a rapidly changing environment, depend on innovation to stay on top, and have a shared purpose.12 Flattened hierarchies even work for some large organizations, such as W.L. Gore, maker of Gore-Tex fabric, which employs 10,000 people. Why do you think, then, that many organizations resist using flat structures? Do you think studying management theory could help you answer this question?

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Theory underlies all the achievements of business. Some of the greatest companies in the world are headquartered in these New York City skyscrapers: American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, J.P. Morgan Chase, JetBlue Airways, Macy’s, NBC Universal, Ralph Lauren, and Time Warner. A number of start-ups are also based in New York: Etsy, Fab, Foursquare, Gilt, Meetup, Shutterstock, and Tumblr. The launch, growth, and profitability of businesses all depend on execution of solid management theory.

Two Overarching Perspectives about Management: Historical & Contemporary In this chapter, we describe two overarching perspectives about management. (See Figure 2.1.) They are:

The historical perspective (1911–1950s) includes three viewpoints—classical, behavioral, and quantitative.

The contemporary perspective (1960s–present) also includes three viewpoints—systems, contingency, and quality-management.

FIGURE 2.1 The Two Overarching Perspectives—Historical and Contemporary

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Page 45Classical Viewpoint: Scientific & Administrative Management If the name of the game is to manage work more efficiently, what can the classical viewpoint teach me?

THE BIG PICTURE The three historical management viewpoints we will describe include (1) the classical, described in this section; (2) the behavioral; and (3) the quantitative. The classical viewpoint, which emphasized ways to manage work more efficiently, had two approaches: (a) scientific management and (b) administrative management. Scientific management, pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, emphasized the scientific study of work methods to improve the productivity of individual workers. Administrative management, pioneered by Henri Fayol and Max Weber, was concerned with managing the total organization.

Bet you’ve never heard of a “therblig,” although it may describe some physical motions you perform from time to time—as when you have to wash dishes, say. A made-up word you won’t find in most dictionaries, therblig was coined by Frank Gilbreth and is, in fact, “Gilbreth” spelled backward, with the “t” and the “h” reversed. It refers to 1 of 17 basic motions. By identifying the therbligs in a job, as in the tasks of a bricklayer (which he had once been), Frank and his wife, Lillian, were able to eliminate motions while simultaneously reducing fatigue.

The Gilbreths were a husband-and-wife team of industrial engineers who were pioneers in one of the classical approaches to management, part of the historical perspective (1911–1950s). As we mentioned, there are three historical management viewpoints or approaches.13 (See Figure 2.2, next page.) They are

Classical viewpoint—1911–1947 Behavioral viewpoint—1913–1950s Quantitative viewpoint—1940s–1950s

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In this section, we describe the classical perspective of management, which originated during the early 1900s. The classical viewpoint , which emphasized finding ways to manage work more efficiently, had two branches—scientific and administrative—each of which is identified with particular pioneering theorists. In general, classical management assumes that people are rational. Let’s compare the two approaches.

Scientific Management: Pioneered by Taylor & the Gilbreths The problem for which scientific management emerged as a solution was this: In the expansive days of the early 20th century, labor was in such short supply that managers were hard-pressed to raise the productivity of workers. Scientific management emphasized the scientific study of work methods to improve the productivity of individual workers. Two of its chief proponents were Frederick W. Taylor and the team of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

Frederick Taylor & the Four Principles of Scientific Management No doubt there are some days when you haven’t studied, or worked, as efficiently as you could. This could be called “underachieving,” or “loafing,” or what Taylor called it—soldiering, deliberately working at less than full capacity. Known as “the father of scientific management,” Taylor was an American engineer from Philadelphia who believed that managers could eliminate soldiering by applying four principles of science:

FIGURE 2.2 The Historical Perspective: Three Viewpoints—Classical, Behavioral, and Quantitative

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1. Evaluate a task by scientifically studying each part of the task (not use old rule-of-thumb methods). 2. Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the task. 3. Give workers the training and incentives to do the task with the proper work methods. 4. Use scientific principles to plan the work methods and ease the way for workers to do their jobs.

Taylor based his system on motion studies, in which he broke down each worker’s job—moving pig iron at a steel company, say—into basic physical motions and then trained workers to use the methods of their best-performing coworkers. In addition, he suggested employers institute a differential rate system, in which more efficient workers earned higher wages.

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Frederick W. Taylor. Called the father of scientific management, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.

Why Taylor Is Important: Although “Taylorism” met considerable resistance from employees fearing that working harder would lead to lost jobs except for the highly productive few, Taylor believed that by raising production both labor and management could increase profits to the point where they no longer would have to quarrel over them. If used correctly, the principles of scientific management can enhance productivity, and such innovations as motion studies and differential pay are still used today.

Lillian and Frank Gilbreth with 11 of their dozen children. As industrial engineers, the Gilbreths pioneered time and motion studies. If you’re an athlete, you can appreciate how small changes can make you more efficient.

Frank & Lillian Gilbreth & Industrial Engineering As mentioned, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were a husband-and-wife team of industrial engineers who lectured at Purdue University in the early 1900s. Their experiences in raising 12 children—to whom they applied some of their ideas about improving efficiency (such as printing the Morse Code on the back of the bathroom door so that family members could learn it while doing other things)—later were popularized in a book, two movies, and a TV sitcom, Cheaper by the Dozen. The Gilbreths expanded on Taylor’s motion studies—for instance, by using movie cameras to film workers at work in order to isolate the parts of a job.

Lillian Gilbreth, who received a PhD in psychology, was the first woman to be a major contributor to management science.

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Administrative Management: Pioneered by Fayol & Weber Scientific management is concerned with the jobs of individuals. Administrative management is concerned with managing the total organization. Among the pioneering theorists were Henri Fayol and Max Weber.

Henri Fayol & the Functions of Management Fayol was not the first to investigate management behavior, but he was the first to systematize it. A French engineer and industrialist, he became known to American business when his most important work, General and Industrial Management, was translated into English in 1930.

Why Fayol Is Important: Fayol was the first to identify the major functions of management (see page 9)— planning, organizing, leading, and controlling, as well as coordinating—the first four of which you’ll recognize as the functions providing the framework for this and most other management books.14

Max Weber & the Rationality of Bureaucracy In our time, the word bureaucracy has come to have negative associations: impersonality, inflexibility, red tape, a molasseslike response to problems. But to German sociologist Max Weber, a bureaucracy was a rational, efficient, ideal organization based on principles of logic. After all, in Weber’s Germany in the late 19th century, many people were in positions of authority (particularly in the government) not because of their abilities but because of their social status. The result, Weber wrote, was that they didn’t perform effectively.

A better-performing organization, he felt, should have five positive bureaucratic features: 1. A well-defined hierarchy of authority. 2. Formal rules and procedures. 3. A clear division of labor, with parts of a complex job being handled by specialists. 4. Impersonality, without reference or connection to a particular person. 5. Careers based on merit.

Why Weber Is Important: Weber’s work was not translated into English until 1947, but it came to have an important influence on the structure of large corporations, such as the Coca-Cola Company.

The Problem with the Classical Viewpoint: Too Mechanistic A flaw in the classical viewpoint is that it is mechanistic: It tends to view humans as cogs within a machine, not taking into account the importance of human needs. Behavioral theory addressed this problem, as we explain next.

Why the Classical Viewpoint Is Important: The essence of the classical viewpoint was that work activity was amenable to a rational approach, that through the application of scientific methods, time and motion studies, and job specialization it was possible to boost productivity. Indeed, these concepts are still in use today, the results visible to you every time you visit McDonald’s or Pizza Hut. The classical viewpoint also led to such innovations as management by objectives and goal setting, as we explain elsewhere.

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Scientific management. Carmakers have broken down automobile manufacturing into its constituent tasks, as shown here for an assembly plant. This reflects the contributions of the school of scientific management. Is there anything wrong with this approach? How could it be improved?

Behavioral Viewpoint: Behaviorism, Human Relations, & Behavioral Science To understand how people are motivated to achieve, what can I learn from the behavioral viewpoint?

THE BIG PICTURE The second of the three historical management perspectives was the behavioral viewpoint, which emphasized the importance of understanding human behavior and of motivating employees toward achievement. The behavioral viewpoint developed over three phases: (1) Early behaviorism was pioneered by Hugo Munsterberg, Mary Parker Follett, and Elton Mayo. (2) The human relations movement was pioneered by Abraham Maslow (who proposed a hierarchy of needs) and Douglas McGregor (who proposed a Theory X and Theory Y view to explain managers’ attitudes toward workers). (3) The behavioral science approach relied on scientific research for developing theories about behavior useful to managers.

The behavioral viewpoint emphasized the importance of understanding human behavior and of motivating employees toward achievement. The behavioral viewpoint developed over three phases: (1) early behaviorism, (2) the human relations movement, and (3) behavioral science.

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Early Behaviorism: Pioneered by Munsterberg, Follett, & Mayo The three people who pioneered behavioral theory were Hugo Munsterberg, Mary Parker Follett, and Elton Mayo.

Hugo Munsterberg & the First Application of Psychology to Industry Called “the father of industrial psychology,” German-born Hugo Munsterberg had a PhD in psychology and a medical degree and joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1892. Munsterberg suggested that psychologists could contribute to industry in three ways. They could:

1. Study jobs and determine which people are best suited to specific jobs. 2. Identify the psychological conditions under which employees do their best work. 3. Devise management strategies to influence employees to follow management’s interests.

Why Munsterberg Is Important: His ideas led to the field of industrial psychology, the study of human behavior in workplaces, which is still taught in colleges today.

Mary Parker Follett & Power Sharing among Employees & Managers A Massachusetts social worker and social philosopher, Mary Parker Follett was lauded on her death in 1933 as “one of the most important women America has yet produced in the fields of civics and sociology.” Instead of following the usual hierarchical arrangement of managers as order givers and employees as order takers, Follett thought organizations should become more democratic, with managers and employees working cooperatively.

The following ideas were among her most important: 1. Organizations should be operated as “communities,” with managers and subordinates

working together in harmony. 2. Conflicts should be resolved by having managers and workers talk over differences and find solutions

that would satisfy both parties—a process she called integration. 3. The work process should be under the control of workers with the relevant knowledge, rather than of

managers, who should act as facilitators. Why Follett Is Important: With these and other ideas, Follett anticipated some of today’s concepts of

“self-managed teams,” “worker empowerment,” and “interdepartmental teams”—that is, members of different departments working together on joint projects.

Elton Mayo & the Supposed “Hawthorne Effect” Do you think workers would be more productive if they thought they were receiving special attention? This was the conclusion drawn by a Harvard research group in the late 1920s.

Conducted by Elton Mayo and his associates at Western Electric’s Hawthorne (Chicago) plant, what came to be called the Hawthorne studies began with an investigation into whether workplace lighting level affected worker productivity. (This was the type of study that Taylor or the Gilbreths might have done.) In later experiments, other variables were altered, such as wage levels, rest periods, and length of workday. Worker performance varied but tended to increase over time, leading Mayo and his colleagues to hypothesize what came to be known as the Hawthorne effect—namely, that employees worked harder if they received added attention, if they thought that managers cared about their welfare and that supervisors paid special attention to them.

However, later investigators found flaws in the studies, such as variations in ventilation and lighting or inadequate follow-through, that were overlooked by the original researchers. Critics also point out that it’s doubtful that workers improved their productivity merely on the basis of receiving more attention rather than because of a particular instructional method or social innovation.15

Why the Hawthorne Studies Are Important: Ultimately, the Hawthorne studies were faulted for being

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poorly designed and not having enough empirical data to support the conclusions. Nevertheless, they succeeded in drawing attention to the importance of “social man” (social beings) and how managers using good human relations could improve worker productivity. This in turn led to the so-called human relations movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Elton Mayo. In the 1920s, Elton Mayo (shown with long cigarette holder) and his team conducted studies of Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant. Do you think you’d perform better in a robotlike job if you thought your supervisor cared about you and paid more attention to you?

The Human Relations Movement: Pioneered by Maslow & McGregor The two theorists who contributed most to the human relations movement —which proposed that better human relations could increase worker productivity—were Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor.

Abraham Maslow & the Hierarchy of Needs What motivates you to perform: Food? Security? Love? Recognition? Self-fulfillment? Probably all of these, Abraham Maslow would say, although some needs must be satisfied before others. The chairman of the psychology department at Brandeis University and one of the earliest researchers to study motivation, in 1943 Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of human needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.16 We discuss this hierarchy in detail in Chapter 12, where we explain why Maslow is important.

Douglas McGregor & Theory X versus Theory Y Having been for a time a college president (at Antioch College in Ohio), Douglas McGregor came to realize that it was not enough for managers to try to be liked; they also needed to be aware of their attitudes toward employees.17 Basically, McGregor suggested in a 1960 book, these attitudes could be either “X” or “Y.”

Theory X represents a pessimistic, negative view of workers. In this view, workers are considered to be irresponsible, to be resistant to change, to lack ambition, to hate work, and to want to be led rather than to lead.

Theory Y represents the outlook of human relations proponents—an optimistic, positive view of workers. In this view, workers are considered to be capable of accepting responsibility, self-direction, and self-control and of being imaginative and creative.

Why Theory X/Theory Y Is Important: The principal contribution offered by the Theory X/Theory Y perspective is that it helps managers understand how their beliefs affect their behavior. For example, Theory

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EXAMPLE

X managers are more likely to micromanage, which leads to employee dissatisfaction, because they believe employees are inherently lazy. Managers can be more effective by considering how their behavior is shaped by their expectations about human nature.

Underlying both Maslow’s and McGregor’s theories is the notion that more job satisfaction leads to greater worker performance—an idea that is somewhat controversial, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 11.

What is your basic view of human nature? Your attitude could be key to your career success. To see the general direction of your outlook, try the following self-assessment.

SELF-ASSESSMENT 2.1

What Is Your Orientation toward Theory X/Theory Y? This self-assessment is designed to reveal your orientation as a manager—whether it tends toward Theory X or Theory Y. Go to connect.mheducation.com and take the self-assessment. When you’re done, answer the following questions:

1. To what extent do you think your results are an accurate reflection of your beliefs about others? Are you surprised by the results?

2. As a leader of a student or work-related project team, how might your results affect your approach toward leading others? Explain.

3. If an employee doesn’t seem to show ambition, can that be changed? Discuss.

The Behavioral Science Approach The human relations movement was a necessary correction to the sterile approach used within scientific management, but its optimism came to be considered too simplistic for practical use. More recently, the human relations view has been superseded by the behavioral science approach to management. Behavioral science relies on scientific research for developing theories about human behavior that can be used to provide practical tools for managers. The disciplines of behavioral science include psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics.

Application of Behavioral Science Approach: The Open-Plan Office—Productivity Enhancer or Productivity Killer?

Today some office layouts mix managers and workers in completely open offices using communal tables. The theory is that this fosters more interaction and increased productivity. But does it work?

The Distraction Next to You. On any given day, probably 40%–60% of all your workplace interactions (including face-to-face chats and e-mails) will be with your immediate fellow employees, says a behavioral scientist who studies such things. There is only a 5%–10% chance of your interacting with someone two rows away.18 And, research shows, face-to-face interruptions constitute one-third more intrusions than do e-mail or phone calls.19 So how are conscientious workers in open-plan offices to get anything done—to avoid “pesky, productivity-sapping interruptions,” in one writer’s phrase?20

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“This Means I’m Busy!” Various workers have come up with their own ways of alerting others that they are not to be interrupted. Some wear special bright-colored sashes or vests or hats. Some block off their work spaces with neon-yellow plastic DO NOT DISTURB barricade tape (from CubeGuard). Some retreat to designated closed offices as “no interruption” zones to get necessary work done.

The Right Seating Mix. Another way to reduce disruption is for companies to assign who sits next to whom, rather than using unassigned seating. In open-plan offices, “people literally catch emotions from one another like a virus,” says Wharton School management professor Sigal Barsade, who suggests that the people who work best together are those with similar emotional temperaments.21 For instance, mixing extroverts and introverts can lower the productivity of both, as introverts, who are quiet and like to keep their distance, may resent the intrusions of extroverts, those outgoing coworkers who need interaction and love to talk and talk.22 Paul English, co-founder of the travel web-site Kayak.com, uses new hires as an excuse to alter existing open-office seating arrangements, taking into careful consideration everything from “employees’ personalities to their political views to their propensity for arriving at work early—or, more important, their propensity for judging colleagues who arrive late,” says one report.23 “If I put someone next to you that’s annoying or there’s a total style clash, I’m going to make your job depressing,” English says.

YOUR CALL The open office is designed to encourage spontaneous interaction, cooperation, and teamwork, with the goal of fostering achievement and productivity among employees. Is there a case to be made for intermingling employees with different personalities and different skills to foster the potential for stimulating breakthrough ideas? What kind of fellow workers in an open office would you like to be seated with and why?

Open-plan seating. What kind of office would you prefer to have for yourself—a private office, a shared private office, a partitioned cubicle, or a desk in an open office scattered with other desks with no partitions? Which would be most comfortable for you personally? Why, theoretically, would the open office best promote superior performance?