With the advent of open-plan offices, partitions have been employed to offer a degree
of privacy, acoustic control and to provide demarcation between departments or
teams. Before any decisions are made about the form the partitioning should take,
full consideration should be given to the task demands of each individual enclosed
by a partition and the psycho-social issues relating to their use.
The immediate impact of partitions can be isolation. This has been referred to as
an “unintended influence” (Statt 1994). Contact between people has a big effect on
the cohesiveness of a group (Furnham 1997). Partitions act as physical constraints
that impede the ease with which people can interact. If interpersonal contact is
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