Status Demarcation in the Office

Abstract

A survey of 529 office workers from three government and three private sector organizations explored the environmental characteristics that demarcate status in the office, the extent to which these characteristics are related to a sense of status support, and the association of status support with workspace and job satisfaction. Four types of environmental characteristics (the nature of workspace furnishings, amount of space, capacity for personalization, and the ability to control access by others) discriminated between supervisory (high-status) and nonsupervisory (lowstatus) respondents. Furthermore, each of the four sets of physical environment properties were related to perceptions of appropriate status support, which was in turn predictive of job satisfaction and satisfaction with workspace. Private versus public sector differences and supervisory versus nonsupervisory differences were explored The implications for space planning and evaluation are considered.