Coworking-spaces: how a phenomenon of the sharing economy builds a novel trend for the workplace and for entrepreneurship

Abstract

The sharing economy brings a new phenomenon—coworking-spaces. One aspect of coworking-spaces is the sharing of office space; another is the sharing of social spaces beside the office. Both give rise to social interactions and thus knowledge and idea exchanges which might provide more than a mere sharing of working-spaces but of entrepreneurship or of incubation. Coworking-spaces stimulate the finding of mates for teams, projects, and entrepreneurship. This paper introduces coworking-spaces into management research. We deliver an understanding of coworking-spaces and then identify key factors which lead to our conceptual model. Our model assumes that performance, especially entrepreneurial performance improves by the learning processes among coworking-users that take upon the individual efficacy, trust and community among coworking-users. All the concepts have a positive relation. Yet, opportunism, often as knowledge leakage, will directly and indirectly spoil learning processes and entrepreneurial performance as it reduces their antecedents trust and community building.