Study of Employees’ Transitions to Open, Flexible Workspaces Focuses on How They Adapt, With Implications for Managers

Many workspaces have become more open and flexible, requiring employees to adapt to perform. While research has shown how open spaces influence employees’ interactions and performance, less is known about how employees adapt during workspace transitions and their experiences once they occupy these spaces.

In "Finding Your Place in a New Workspace: Examining Employees’ Adaptation in Physical Workspaces," researchers examined two adaptation efforts, job crafting and identity marking, and the responses individuals adopted during a workspace transition. Their findings have practical applications for managers. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Macquarie University, and Texas Christian University. It is published in the Australian Journal of Management.

“Workplaces have shifted from static to more flexible environments where employees can rearrange, repurpose, and work within more open-plan spaces,” explains Maria Tomprou, Assistant Teaching Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who led the study. “This shift from closed to more open environments can trigger changes that create challenges and opportunities—both of which require employees to adapt.”

Few studies have focused on how employees experience transitions of this kind, and the authors suggest that scholars of organizational behavior and management can bring a disciplinary lens to generate insights into employees’ adaptive responses. In this study, researchers used self-regulation theory to examine employees’ daily efforts that guide their adjustment. These efforts include employees exerting control over their work, which they term job crafting, reinforced by efforts to personalize their new workspace through a process they term identity marking.

In one part of their work, researchers conducted a field study at an Australasian university undergoing a workspace transition, interviewing employees a month before the transition and two months afterward to examine how pre-move workspace beliefs and post-move adaptive behaviors influenced adaptation. In another part of the study, they used daily diaries to examine how employees adapted in the early days of the transition.

Based on their findings, the authors offer guidelines for managers leading transitions to help employees claim agency over their new workspaces and ways of working. They recommend that managers create opportunities and latitude for employees to use their agency in their new workspaces, such as through decorating and rearranging their settings. They also suggest that managers promote activities to enhance positive feelings in the new workspace, such as empowering employees to explore and experiment with it and holding group activities in the new environment.

“Moving to open workspaces can be a double-edged sword for employees, and these experiences are much more emotionally laden than previously thought,” says Sarah Bankins, Associate Professor of Management at Macquarie University, who coauthored the study. “Considering employees’ agency is vital because it allows examinations of how employees transitioning to new workspaces leverage their sense of autonomy and control of their space and ultimately, how that affects adaptation and performance.”

Among the study’s limitations, the authors point out that their study focused on just one workplace, which could limit the generalizability of their findings. “Our study introduces a goal-oriented approach to studying workspaces and shifts attention to employees’ agency in the process of adaptation,” adds Artemis Boulamatsi, Assistant Professor of Management at Texas Christian University, who coauthored the study. “We offer practical guidance for managers to enhance approaches to workspace transitions and help employees find new ways to work in a new physical environment.”

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Summarized from an article in the Australian Journal of Management, "Finding Your Place in a New Workspace: Examining Employees’ Adaptation in Physical Workspaces," by Tomprou, M (Carnegie Mellon University), Bankins, S (Macquarie University), and Boulamatsi, A (Texas Christian University). Copyright 2026 The Authors. All rights reserved.