It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers. My first job

It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers. My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating. OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week. My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy. But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone. So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.