A Cross-Cultural Perspective On Coworking Spaces

Time of realization: 2020 – 2022
Financing: IGA FPH
Description: The concept of coworking has recently received increasingly more attention but still remains under-researched. Given the diverse composition of coworking space members, the proposed project initially intended to a) explore the impact of national culture values on organizational culture in coworking spaces and b) investigate the effect of personal values and cultural intelligence on well-being and performance in coworking spaces.

However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the initial focus on Cross-Cultural Management could not be pursued, as the planned data collection was canceled due to the closure of coworking spaces. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on businesses, including coworking spaces, which suffered not only from the closures but also from social distancing measures, disrupting the prior benefits coworking members could draw from their membership, such as knowledge exchange from physical proximity, social support, etc.

In order to investigate this further, the project was slightly shifted to more closely capture the specific impact of Covid-19 as well, and more closely explore the necessary underpinnings for the post-Covid-19 workplace, by focusing on these four core elements:

 

  1. Investigating the impact of Covid-19 on coworking through a joint data collection together with Deskmag (a coworking magazine) and the German Coworking Federation
  2. Outlining the socio-economic factors which have enabled the rapid growth of the coworking industry prior to the pandemic with the specific example of the socio-economic environment in Prague as a major coworking hub
  3. Investigating human talent attraction and retention mechanisms with qualitative data collected from coworking space owners and operators from the Visegrad region
  4. Addressing methodological considerations to advance qualitative research for post-Covid-19 research on coworking
Main coordinator: Manuel Mayerhoffer, MSc
Other participants from the Department of Entrepreneurship: prof. Ing. Mgr. Martin Lukeš, Ph.D.

Marko Orel, Ph.D.

Florian Maximilian Diener, M.A.