The Influence of the Physical Working Environment on Employee Collaboration with a Highlight on Team Performance: Analysis of Coworking Sites in the Basque Country

This chapter explores the influence of the physical working environment on collaborative teams with a highlight on team performance. The transition of current work into more mobile and technology-centred productive forms has changed the understanding of the workplace and its physical limits. The way work is understood now, brings a whole new dimension with the introduction of innovative practices like open office-plans or eco-design that have changed employees' vision towards work and the way teams perform inside spatial boundaries. With a theoretical approximation to the topic of the physical working environment and its influence on collaborative teams, it has been supported by literary review and existing evidence the impact of work settings, which are depicted as spatial settings designed for productive means and the socialization process. Considering Mattessich and Monsey's (2001) contributions to the concept of teamwork and Sawyer's (2017) analysis of collaboration as circumstantial and based on life events, the literary review covers an extensive study of the main approaches on physical working environment, collaboration, and team performance. Regarding the empirical analysis, a quantitative methodology has been used to measure data that has been collected according to a 7-point Likert scale questionnaire among different coworking sites in the Basque Country (Spain) to statistically measure the relationship between the physical working environment and collaboration with further considerations about team performance and Team Academy. The partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) has drawn convincing conclusions about the relationship between the main constructs from the empirical model. The results obtained show a standardized β value of 0.622 for the relationship between the work environment and collaboration, and the analysis of significance also supports the results. Therefore, hypothesis H2 is accepted. Non-significant results for the other two hypotheses have rejected hypotheses H1 and H3. In regards, the statistical analysis confirms that the physical working environment has a positive relationship with collaboration and mostly, with its indicator teamwork, transferable to the concept of team performance and Team Academy when collaboration is understood as the highest form of teamwork (Salas et al., 2017). This chapter explores the influence of the physical working environment on collaborative teams with a highlight on team p