Open-Plan Offices Are Linked To Higher Workplace Bullying Risk, Study Finds

When someone at work is making life miserable, the instinct is to look inward. Maybe a particular personality rubs colleagues the wrong way. Maybe office life just isn’t a good fit. Now, research suggests office design may play a larger role than many people realize.

Researchers drawing on a national probability sample of more than 3,300 Swedish workers found that employees in traditional open offices faced about a 67 percent higher risk of being bullied compared to colleagues in private or smaller shared spaces. That association held even after accounting for personality differences. It wasn’t who those workers were that made them more vulnerable. It was where they sat.

Open-plan offices have long drawn criticism for noise, distraction, and the toll on concentration. But this research, published in the journal Occupational Health Science, links office design to one of the most damaging experiences a worker can face. For employers still navigating post-pandemic workspace decisions, those results carry weight that extends well beyond square footage.

How Researchers Measured Workplace Bullying by Office Type

Led by Michael Rosander of Linköping University in Sweden and Morten Birkeland Nielsen of the National Institute of Occupational Health in Norway, the study asked a question prior research had largely ignored: does office design affect how likely workers are to be bullied?

Statistics Sweden, a government agency, handled sampling and data collection over a two-month period in fall 2024, pulling from a national probability sample of the entire Swedish working population. Of the 3,307 adults who responded, roughly 70 percent performed office work at least part of the day. Those participants identified their workspace type: a private office, a small shared office, a traditional open office, or an activity-based open office, where workers move between different zones depending on their tasks rather than sitting at one assigned desk.

Bullying was measured using a validated 22-item questionnaire capturing repeated exposure to negative behaviors on the job, including social exclusion, belittling remarks, and being deliberately assigned meaningless tasks. Statistical models tested whether office type predicted bullying risk, controlling for age, remote work habits, time spent in the office, and five personality traits.

Open Office Workers Face a Significantly Higher Workplace Bullying Risk

Workers in traditional open offices faced significantly higher bullying risk. After controlling for all other variables, those employees were 67 percent more likely to be bullied than workers in private or smaller shared offices. With an estimated 450,000 Swedish workers facing bullying at any given time, even a moderate increase in statistical risk translates to a large number of people experiencing sustained, repeated mistreatment.

Personality traits, including neuroticism and agreeableness, did not explain the elevated risk. As the authors write in the paper, “the risk is not attributable to individual differences but rather to characteristics of the physical and social environment.”

For anyone who has blamed themselves for a rough workplace dynamic, that is worth sitting with. Being targeted at work may have less to do with who someone is and more to do with the conditions their employer built around them. That said, because the study captured data at a single point in time, it cannot establish that open offices directly cause bullying. What it does show is a consistent, statistically significant association between office type and bullying risk, one that survived multiple layers of statistical controls.

Why Traditional Open Offices May Create Conditions for Conflict

Researchers offer several theoretical explanations for why traditional open offices show up so clearly in the data.

Constant visibility is one candidate. A private office door provides a physical and psychological buffer. On a large open floor, workers are perpetually on display, making it harder to escape someone who treats them poorly. Once bullying begins, researchers suggest that having no retreat may accelerate its progression, since every workday means staying in close proximity to whoever is causing harm.

Reduced face-to-face communication may make things worse in a counterintuitive way. Research cited in the study found that switching to open-plan layouts can actually cut direct personal interaction by as much as 70 percent. Workers adopt informal norms against interrupting one another, which sounds considerate but means misunderstandings go unaddressed and small tensions compound quietly until something gives.

Clashing work styles and expectations are another possible driver. Traditional open offices tend to mix employees whose jobs demand very different environments. A developer who needs sustained quiet may sit next to a salesperson who spends the day on calls. When one person’s workflow routinely disrupts another’s, frustration builds into resentment, resentment hardens into conflict, and conflict, left unmanaged, can escalate into bullying. These are informed hypotheses drawn from the research literature, not mechanisms the study itself tested directly.

Activity-Based Offices and the Workplace Bullying Gap

Not all open offices showed the same pattern. Workers in activity-based settings showed no statistically significant increase in bullying compared to those in private or smaller offices. Researchers suggest one possible reason is mobility. In activity-based offices, an employee can physically relocate when tensions rise, and that option may interrupt the escalation cycle that traditional open-plan settings appear to accelerate.

Job satisfaction tracked along the same lines. Employees in traditional open offices scored measurably lower on satisfaction than those in private or smaller spaces. Workers in activity-based offices did not show that same dip. Both open-office types, however, were associated with higher rates of wanting to quit compared to workers in private offices, suggesting that even more flexible arrangements carry their own costs.

Researchers note that conflict-management culture matters too. When interpersonal tension is addressed early, before it becomes one-sided and deeply set, bullying is less likely to take hold regardless of office type.

Open-plan offices are not going away. Cost savings and hybrid work models have only accelerated the move toward shared, flexible workspaces. But the next time someone wonders why the office feels unbearable, the layout itself may deserve a closer look.

---