The people we sit near at work inevitably impact our day. They may brighten our mood or drive us crazy.
Researchers looked at the 25-foot radius around high-performers at a large technology firm and found that these workers boosted performance in coworkers by 15 percent. That “positive spillover” translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits, according to new research from Dylan Minor, an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School.
Of course, the flipside is that bad eggs impact their neighbors, too. Negative spillover from so-called toxic workers is even more pronounced—sometimes having twice the magnitude of impact on profits as positive spillover.
“Companies are realizing that, ‘wow, spatial management really does matter. Let’s put some more work into thinking about how to do it well,’” he says.
The Spillover Effect
“We’ve known since kindergarten that who you sit next to can matter,” Minor says.
But it’s not so simple. People are not uniformly good or bad at their jobs; many excel in some areas and are average or below average in others. “In today’s world, most of the jobs we do are very much multidimensional,” Minor says. “We’re not just putting widgets together one piece at a time.”
So what did physical proximity do when employees’ work was approached in a multidimensional way? To explore this, Minor and Housman got two years’ worth of detailed information on the performance of more than 2,000 workers at the tech firm. They picked two measures of performance—speed and quality—and gave workers a ranking of either high or low for each.
They also defined toxic workers the same way as in their previous research, as anyone whose behavior was so bad that they were fired. Toxic workers ended up comprising about 2 percent of the workers studied.
Positive Spillover
Having a high-performing neighbor is a bonus for everyone. Employees who ranked high on either speed or quality boosted the performance of those within a 25-foot radius.
The impact was particularly strong on those who were matched with someone who had a complementary skill. In other words, if Bill is rated high for speed and Bob is rated low, Bob’s speed will improve when he sits near Bill, more so than if they were both already speedy workers. The same holds true for quality.
And, crucially, Bill’s speed will not be dragged down by his slower-moving neighbor.
“The beautiful part of it is that when we put these people together, they’re not going to materially suffer on the area of strength,” Minor says. “They’re only going to improve on their area of weakness.”
This idea of matching people with complementary strengths makes sense when the skill in question is something that has a finite upper limit, like speed, Minor explains. But for other skills, like creativity, where there is no true upper limit, it might make sense to pair people with the same strengths so that their positive spillover keeps nudging the other to do more and more creative work.
Negative Spillover
Toxic workers are really, really toxic. And they infect their neighbors very quickly.
“Once a toxic person shows up next to you, your risk of becoming toxic yourself has gone up,” Minor says. And while positive spillover was limited to about a 25-foot radius, with toxic workers, “you can see their imprint and negative effect across an entire floor.”
Keep in mind how narrowly the researchers defined toxic—someone who is fired for their behavior. This means that simply sitting near someone who gets fired means you yourself are now more likely to commit an act heinous enough to merit firing.
And this toxic spillover happens almost immediately. The researchers saw neighbors go bad, so to speak, as soon as that toxic neighbor showed up. Whereas positive spillover that boosted speed or quality generally took a month to impact a lower-performing neighbor.
Read the article by Michael Housman and Dylan Minor / Kellogg Insight
