It's a Matter of Time: The Role of Temporal Perceptions in Emotional Experiences of Work Interruptions

Abstract

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.

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“…Qualitative Paper (Feldman & Greenway, 2021), and the 2021 Best Conceptual Paper (Watson et al, 2021) once more demonstrate GOM's ability and success in achieving these objectives and mission statement. Indeed, our 2021 Best Papers once again reflect GOM's openness to (1) micro- (Feldman & Greenway, 2021) and macro- (Shoss et al, 2021) research with a touch of micro-level research to it as well; (2) conceptual (Watson et al, 2021) and empirical (Feldman & Greenway, 2021;Shoss et al, 2021) articles; and (3) quantitative (Shoss et al, 2021) and qualitative (Feldman & Greenway, 2021) methods.…”

“…This year’s three articles selected by GOM ’s editorial leadership for special recognition as the 2021 Best Quantitative Paper ( Shoss et al, 2021 ), 2021 Best Qualitative Paper ( Feldman & Greenway, 2021 ), and the 2021 Best Conceptual Paper ( Watson et al, 2021 ) once more demonstrate GOM ’s ability and success in achieving these objectives and mission statement. Indeed, our 2021 Best Papers once again reflect GOM ’s openness to (1) micro- ( Feldman & Greenway, 2021 ) and macro- ( Shoss et al, 2021 ) research with a touch of micro-level research to it as well; (2) conceptual ( Watson et al, 2021 ) and empirical ( Feldman & Greenway, 2021 ; Shoss et al, 2021 ) articles; and (3) quantitative ( Shoss et al, 2021 ) and qualitative ( Feldman & Greenway, 2021 ) methods. We believe that these 2021 articles offered the type of theoretical, conceptual, and/or empirical contributions to the literature that most warranted a “Best Paper” award.…”