Close to Me: The Impact of the Interplay of Physical and Social Proximity on Dyadic Collaboration Effectiveness

Previous organizational studies have independently documented the roles played by physical proximity and by intra-organizational social networks in inter-personal collaboration at work but have rarely – if ever – theorized or empirically examined their joint impact. Our goal, therefore, is to explore the impact of the interplay between physical and social proximity on the effectiveness of inter-personal collaboration. Taking advantage of a quasi-natural experiment where a global pharmaceutical firm relocated two regional offices to two new sites, we measured both the interpersonal physical distances and social networks before and after the moves. Beyond the expected positive effects on collaboration effectiveness, we discovered that the effects of the physical and social dimensions were not independent. Social proximity (in the form of inter-personal affective closeness) mediated the effect of physical proximity on dyadic collaboration, while inter-personal physical distance amplified the positive effect of social proximity (in the form of dyadic closure or ties linked by common third parties) on dyadic collaboration. In other words, physical proximity and dyadic closure had substitutive effects on collaboration performance.