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Work interruptions are now ubiquitous in organizational life. However, our knowledge about how individuals experience work interruptions remains incomplete. Prior research has linked work interruption events to negative emotions, but scholars have yet to consider if—and when—such events might generate positive emotions. To explore this possibility, we adopted a temporal lens. Conceptualizing interruptions as emotionally charged events that involve changes to people’s time use, we conducted a qualitative field study of 251 work interruptions. Our inductive analysis revealed that many interruptions are experienced positively rather than negatively and that some are experienced neutrally (i.e., with no emotion). We found that this variation can be explained, in part, by four subjective temporal perceptions: time worthiness, timing, duration, and task expectedness. We also identified two contextual factors— relational context and work context—that moderate the effects of these temporal perceptions. Overall, our study underscores that emotional experiences of work interruptions vary far more widely that prior research suggests, identifies subjective temporal perceptions as key drivers of differing interruption experiences, and adds contextual richness to theories of interruptions.

Employees often notice issues as they go about their work, but they are more likely to remain silent than to voice about those issues. This means that organizations miss out on critical opportunities for improvement. We deepen understanding of why and when employees do speak up by theorizing about voice episodes that arise when organizational issues (e.g., policies, actions) cause others to suffer. We suggest that when employees feel prosocial emotions—empathic concern, empathic anger, and/or guilt—in response to another’s suffering, they are more likely to voice about the issues creating that suffering. Specifically, we propose that these other-oriented emotions make it more likely that employees will see an opportunity for voice, feel sufficiently motivated to voice, and assess the potential benefits of speaking up as greater than the possible costs. We also posit that three contextual factors—relationship to sufferer, relational scripts, and emotional culture—influence whether (and how intensely) employees experience prosocial emotions in response to suffering triggered by an organizational issue, and thus affect the likelihood of voice. By theorizing the mechanisms through which prosocial emotions animate a specific episode of voice, we provide a foundation for understanding how employees can be moved to speak up.

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