Shooting the breeze at the office water cooler increases productivity, kind of like an ad-hoc team-building exercise, right?

Turns out office workers are twice as likely to agree with that assertion as than the executives they work for, according to a recent Office Team survey of 539 office workers and 150 senior executives.

To their credit, most senior execs accepted the fact that workers engage in water-cooler chat. Forty-one percent said they saw no effect on productivity, and 21 percent actually agreed that such talk increases productivity by encouraging workers to bond. More than a third, however, said it was a waste of time and hurt productivity.

Office workers had a different view. Although 26 percent said water-cooler talk was wasteful and a drain on productivity, 40 percent of workers said it improved productivity and 30 percent said it had no effect either way.

There was one area of management/worker agreement: 4 percent of each group both declined to answer.