In my experience, colleagues are usually not a distraction, bosses are. With colleagues, I have more control over the timing (“not now, I am right in the middle of something… okay, now I am free”), and half of the chatting is mutual help. With bosses, the typical interaction is that I am interrupted in the middle of solving a problem X, and asked to provide progress report on an unrelated problem Y.
In my experience, colleagues are usually not a distraction, bosses are. With colleagues, I have more control over the timing (“not now, I am right in the middle of something… okay, now I am free”), and half of the chatting is mutual help. With bosses, the typical interaction is that I am interrupted in the middle of solving a problem X, and asked to provide progress report on an unrelated problem Y.