Take the following progression:
The intention here would probably be to use the second chord as a chromatic passage between the first and third chords. Let's now try it like this:
It would probably sound better. What happened was that in the second position you kept the fifth of the first chord, so you also kept the listener "hanging" to the sound of first chord, while you are descending the root (and naturally, the accompanying octave) a half step to make a chromatic passage to the root of the third chord.
