A Handbook of Management Theories and Models for Office Environments and Services

Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek, Vitalija Danivska, Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek, Vitalija Danivska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000434200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione industriale
• Index: Business

Although workplace design and management are gaining more and more attention from modern organizations, workplace research is still very fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia. There are several books on the market related to workplaces, facility management (FM), and corporate real estate management (CREM) disciplines, but few open up a theoretical and practical discussion across multiple theories from different disciplines. Therefore, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplace management and effects of workplace design on employees has been or could be studied. A lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines, and sadly, many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Therefore, this new book series is started by associate professor Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and postdoc researcher Vitalija Danivska (Aalto University, Finland) as editors, published by Routledge. It is titled 'Transdisciplinary Workplace Research and Management' because it bundles important research insights from different disciplinary fields and shows its relevance for both academic workplace research and workplace management in practice. The books will address the complexity of the transdisciplinary angle necessary to solve ongoing workplace-related issues in practice, such as knowledge worker productivity, office use, and more strategic management. In addition, the editors work towards further collaboration and integration of the necessary disciplines for further development of the workplace field in research and in practice. This book series is relevant for workplace experts both in academia and industry.

This second book in the series focuses on the role of workplace management in the organization and the tasks that workplace management needs to consider. The 18 theories that are presented in this book and applied to workplace research discuss management aspects from the organization's perspective or dive deeper into issues related to people and/or building management. They all emphasize that workplace management is a complex matter that requires more strategic attention in order to add value for various stakeholders. The final chapter of the book describes a first step towards integrating the presented theories into an interdisciplinary framework for developing a grand workplace management theory.

1
Collecting theories to obtain an interdisciplinary understanding of workplace management

Vitalija Danivska* and Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek

*Corresponding author: [email protected]

DOI: 10.1201/9781003128786-1

1 Introduction

Workplace in general is understood as a “place where work is done” (WordNet-Online, n.d.). Workplace management, in one form or another, has been around since the first buildings dedicated to performing work-related tasks appeared. But only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when office building construction boomed, the attention was directed to office layouts and ‘the best way to perform work tasks’, highly influenced by scientific management father Frederick Winslow Taylor. With improvement of building techniques and growth of employees’ rights, offices started changing and providing more personalization opportunities. Around the middle of the 20th century, dedicated managers for managing physical space (office buildings) started appearing. However, their focus remained on timely provision of square metres and they considered real estate users rather limitedly. Around the 1980s, the need to organise operations that were spread across multiple locations led to the birth of a new – facilities – management (FM) regime in research. Later in the 1990s, Joroff et al. (1993) introduced corporate real estate as the fifth resource, “whose strategic value is just emerging”, which led towards development of the corporate real estate management (CREM) research field. FM originally concentrated on a more operational level of building management, while CREM emphasized the financial management of real estate.

During the same time, organisational studies were developing knowledge about organisations and human behaviour in organisational settings. Already in the first half of the 20th century, organisational researchers introduced the idea that work performance relates to group dynamics and that the physical space is a factor that affects formal and informal relationships in the organisation. Studies on the social work environment started to criticise the scientific management approach, which is now considered as the beginning of the human relations field (Chanlat, 2006). In organisational studies, physical space is seen as part of organisational space, however, often only as a setting in which organisational relationships happen and can be studied. Nonetheless, from the 1990s onwards, the number of studies on the employee–(physical) workplace relationship started to grow, showing the interest to align workplace design to employee needs as well.

Even though workplace management is widely discussed, there is no one definition used among academics and practitioners. The International FM Association (IFMA) defines workplace management as “the management of all resources needed to design & maintain appropriate, effective and economical workplace experiences that align to strategic business objectives and support people in doing their best work every day, wherever they are” ( Jervis & Mawson, 2014, p. 10). Similarly, Redlein et al. (2020) define workplace strategy as “the alignment of the organisation’s workplace with the business strategy in order to optimise the effectiveness of its people and achieve its strategic business goals. It takes into account different dimensions of a company, its physical and virtual work environments, culture, business processes, technologies and other resources” (p. 179).

In practice, workplace management has been understood as one of the functions of facility management (FM), corporate real estate management (CREM), or human resource management (HRM) departments. Facilities management (FM) is now officially defined in a European Committee for Standardization (CEN) norm as “the integration of processes within an organisation to maintain and develop the agreed services which support and improve the effectiveness of its primary activities” (CEN, 2007, p. 5). Corporate real estate management (CREM) is not defined officially, but it generally is understood as the management of a corporation’s real estate portfolio by aligning the portfolio and services to the needs of the core business, with the ultimate goal to add value to the corporation (Dewulf et al., 2000). Human resource management (HRM) does not have a unified definition either but can be referred to as the policies and practices that influence employees’ behaviour, attitudes, and performance (De Cieri & Kramar, 2005). In most organisations, workplace management is the responsibility of one of these three departments. However, as Redlein et al. (2020) point out, it really needs a collaboration of HRM, FM, CREM, and also finance, marketing, IT, business unit leaders, employee advocates, and the C-suite to be able to create a workplace that is effective for the organisation and healthy for the employees. So, there seems to be agreement that workplace management is a collaborative task towards aligning the workplace with the organisation and the employees using it.

Various aspects of workplace (management) are studied in the fields of economics, organisational management, architecture, engineering sciences, medical sciences, and psychology. These different areas of research bring diverse approaches to workplace management, concentrating on either people, the environment, or the organisation. Each of these disciplines have their own focus on the mechanisms behind successful management of workplaces and how its different aspects relate to each other. In addition, academics from these different backgrounds (often working in different faculties and departments) tend to present their workplace-related research at different conferences and publish in specific disciplinary journals. This fragmentation leads to much knowledge being lost between disciplines and many insights not being integrated in an overall theoretical framework or used in workplace management in practice.

1.1 A complex wicked problem

Workplace management is generally not considered to be a separate academic discipline. As both this introduction and the first chapter of the first book in this series demonstrate, workplace management needs input from many different disciplines, thus it could be considered as a ‘complex problem’ that needs to be seen as a whole rather than the sum of all the parts (Appel-Meulenbroek & Danivska, 2021; Bernstein, 2015). Complex, real-world problems require knowledge from multiple disciplines and might suffer from fragmented knowledge and discipline-specific reasoning. Moreover, managing organisational workplaces can be considered as a wicked problem. Wicked problems are difficult to detect, and they are influenced by many social and political factors that change over time (Kreuter et al., 2004). The four characteristics of wicked problems that Kreuter et al. identified clearly apply to workplace management processes:

1. 1 the nature of the problem is viewed differently depending on the perspectives and biases of those with a stake in the problem,
2. 2 multiple stakeholders are involved which disagree about the problem and the optimal solution,
3. 3 it is unclear when the problem is actually solved,
4. 4 what works in one context does not necessarily work in another, similar context.

In other fields that deal with complex real-world problems, a transdisciplinary approach is proven to be effective. The term transdisciplinarity has been explained in detail in the first book of this series. To summarise its essence here: Trans means going “across the disciplines, between the disciplines, and beyond and outside all disciplines” with the goal to understand the complex world (McGregor, 2004, p. 2). Transdisciplinarity can be captured in two main aspects. First, it is a different manner of seeing the world (Max-Neef, 2005). It means that common patterns are searched instead of separate ideas, which leads to a deeper understanding of the world, opening up new perspectives and complexity of the world. Second, transdisciplinarity addresses the relation between science and society. It focuses on demand-driven research of real-world problems ( Jahn et al., 2012). Only then the produced knowledge can be really shared with practice, as there is a common process of making sense of it all, which is what distinguishes interdisciplinary from transdisciplinary ( Jahn et al., 2012).

A transdisciplinary approach is also the essence of this book series and its books. While several other books and journals are dedicated to workplace management and design, only very few open up a theoretical discussion across multiple theories from different disciplines. Moreover, there is a lack of a holistic interdisciplinary Workplace Management framework that ties such theories together. This research gap is precisely the goal of this second book in the series. This book provides insights in the (potential) application of 18 theories from multiple disciplinary fields towards managing the complex world of workplace, consisting of organisations, buildings,...