ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an exploration into employees' attitudes and behaviors in relation to their work environments in the hope of finding a more revealing explanation for the decreasing use of highly valued private offices in American business culture. It explores the relationships between work activities, satisfaction, and privacy. Privacy is assessed by two dichotomous variables: open vs. closed office design and shared vs. unshared office space. The chapter suggests that privacy encourages communication while the absence of privacy limits communication. It examines the extent to which subjective-personal versus subjective-social comparisons explain links between privacy and satisfaction. Social satisfaction was measured separately because advocates of open offices claim that open designs provide more desirable social environments than do conventional offices. Significant main effects for office design and sharing were found for working alone, amount of interaction, and interaction frequency; office design was also significant in the extrinsic reward satisfaction and satisfaction with fringe benefits analyses.
