Kevin Lewis

In recent years, there’s been a big movement toward open offices in the United States, partly based on the notion that transparency is good for business. But based on a recent study, the lack of privacy in those offices could be stifling innovation and efficiency. An in-depth study in a Chinese factory by a researcher from Harvard uncovered a “transparency paradox”: Workers in an open environment hide their procedural innovations from management for fear of being caught deviating from the “best practices” script. The workers are so good at hiding this behavior that the researcher had to arrange for several undergraduates who were originally from China to infiltrate the assembly line as regular workers. When management wasn’t nearby, the workers used “little tricks” to improve efficiency, but, when management approached, the workers went back on script. The researcher then tried an experiment, with the following result: “Performance on each of the four lines surrounded by curtains, measured in defect-free units per hour (UPH), increased by as much as 10–15 percent after the first week and maintained a lead over the 28 control lines for the remaining five months of the experiment....[T]he curtained lines quickly also became the loudest, with the most talking inside.”

Related: The Transparency Paradox

Ethan Bernstein

Related: The Transparency Paradox

Martha White (MSNBC)