Polychronicity: Matching Time Styles and Task Types. Some Evidence from a Student Experiment

Abstract

Polychronicity, an under-researched dimension of diversity, refers to the degree to which a person likes to engage in several tasks at once. Common sense, scientific theory and initial evidence suggest that individuals will perform better when faced with a job whose demands on multi-tasking match their individual time styles. This paper reports on an experiment among students to test the performance effect of the person-job-fit with respect to polychronicity. Unlike prior research, our experimental conditions focus on the mode of allocating scarce time among multiple tasks. The preliminary results confirm a performance premium in case of a match between time styles and task types.