Seat of power: Your desk buddies matter

Sitting next to the right colleague can meaningfully improve your performance at work. Sitting next to the wrong one can do the opposite. New research shows that physical proximity shapes behavior in powerful ways—boosting productivity when employees have complementary strengths, and increasing risk when toxic behavior enters the mix.

The findings come from a report by Dylan Minor, visiting assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Housman of HiQ Labs, written for consulting firm Cornerstone OnDemand. The researchers analyzed more than 2,000 employees at a large technology company with offices across the U.S. and Europe, tracking performance, misconduct, and detailed seating arrangements over a two-year period.

To measure “spillover,” the team mapped office layouts and applied distance-weighting models to determine how closely coworkers sat to one another. This allowed them to quantify how much one employee’s behavior—good or bad—affected those nearby.

The researchers identified three broad employee archetypes. Productive workers completed tasks quickly but produced lower-quality output. Quality workers delivered high-quality results at the expense of speed. Generalists performed at average levels across both dimensions.

The strongest performance gains occurred when employees with complementary strengths were seated together. Pairing productive workers with quality workers led to a 13% increase in productivity and a 17% improvement in effectiveness. Notably, spillover effects were most pronounced in areas where an employee was weakest, while strengths were largely unaffected.

In other words, fast workers became more careful when seated near quality-focused colleagues, and quality-focused workers sped up when sitting next to faster peers. Simply pairing two employees with the same strengths produced far smaller gains.

But spillover cuts both ways. The study also examined toxic workers—employees fired for misconduct or unethical behavior. Sitting near a toxic colleague significantly increased the likelihood that nearby workers would themselves engage in behavior that led to disciplinary action.

The negative effects appeared quickly, but there was good news: once a toxic worker was removed or relocated, the harmful spillover largely disappeared within one to two months. This suggests that toxicity is contagious, but not permanent—if addressed early.

The authors argue that employee engagement surveys can serve as an early-warning system, helping managers identify toxic environments before damage spreads more widely.

Importantly, the research reinforces that there is rarely a true “superstar” who excels at everything. Most employees are specialists, strong in some areas and weaker in others. Performance improves most when organizations recognize this reality and design seating arrangements that allow complementary skills to reinforce one another.

As Minor notes, physical space is a relatively inexpensive lever compared to hiring, training, or restructuring. When managed deliberately, office layout becomes a practical, data-driven tool for increasing productivity while limiting the spread of harmful behavior.