A Sustainable Project Management Strategy against Multitasking Situations from the Viewpoints of Cognitive Mechanism and Motivational Belief

Abstract

In modern society, multitasking is necessary for a worker to accomplish a final goal by their deadline, which could be pursued for either a single goal or multiple goals. Moreover, a worker who has the authority to prioritize their tasks can make plans about the process of behavioral strategies to perform each task by making a to-do list. This strategy is a way of unpacking that which seems to affect the expectancy of goal attainment and heighten the value and importance of the goal. Otherwise, a worker could write a to-do list without specific action plans. These effects of unpacking and packing can be used as management strategies for multitasking engagement and could impact a worker’s cognition differently depending on the goal relations, including if there is a single goal or multiple goals. On the one hand, in pursuit of a single goal, unpacking can facilitate a worker’s judgment of the importance of the task. On the other hand, in pursuit of multiple goals, a worker’s judgment of one task’s importance can conflict with another task due to contradictory unpacking guidelines. Additionally, self-regulation as an intrinsic motivation empowers conscious intentions to neglect the cognitive effects of the to-do list. Therefore, those with low self-regulation tend to be encouraged by the effect of unpacking, but those with high self-regulation have the effects of unpacking inhibited. This theoretical model was constructed to identify the cognitive mechanism and the role of self-regulation on boundary conditions in regard to the different effects on unpacking. This study was confirmed via the two-way experiment (single- and multiple-goal x packing and unpacking) to explore the effects of the cognitive mechanism on task importance. The following test was performed via the three-way experiment, using an additional variable, the levels of self-regulation (low self-regulation and high self-regulation), to verify whether they inhibit cognitive effects. This study suggests that the judgment of task importance is different in accordance with goal relations, packing and unpacking, and self-regulations for sustainable management strategies of multitasking.

Did You Invest Less Than Me? The Effect of Other’s Share of Investment on Psychological Ownership of Crowdfunding Projects

“…In other words, no matter how much a user invests in the subject, they should be perceived as having the highest possible psychological ownership. It is expected that psychological ownership can be fully utilized in various areas in line with the researches that derive interesting insights based on recent consumer sentiment [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Second, Experiment 2 suggests that the greater the intangibility, the less the effect of relativity of investment.…”

Multitasking in Knowledge Intensive Business Services

“…It is known that in the project management field, the term "project" is defined as a temporary endeavor consisting of activities and tasks to be undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. It is also known that nowadays with the continuous development of technology and flexible changes in the organization, employees of many companies and industries work on multiple projects at the same time [30]. In addition, they handle not only various types of projects at the same time but also normal operations.…”

“…In his book "Brain rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School", a developmental molecular biologist Medina (2008) is writing that "…a person who is interrupted takes 50 per cent longer to accomplish a task and makes up to 50 per cent more errors" [29]. [17,24] Reduced reaction times and task completion rates x [3,29] Higher error rates x x [24,28,29,37] Longer task completion time x [37] Anxiety, frustration and confusion x [24] Psychological distress, reduced well-being and burnout x [13,30,37] Increased intrinsic motivation x [10] Increased project output x [3] Timely information transfer and advice provision x [19] Improved knowledge transfer effort and the acquisition of new routines x [3,9,10] Lower transaction costs x [10] Diminishing marginal returns x [3] Multitasking is also associated with a range of negative emotional costs such as anxiety, frustration, confusion [24], psychological distress and decreased well-being [20] and burnout [13].…”