Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to

Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to chat about a work-related project can be misconstrued by an uninformed observer as "not working". This incentivizes employees to stay in their own cubicles. That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).