The Influence of Task Interruption on Individual Decision Making: An Information Overload Perspective

Speier, Cheri; Valacich, Joseph S.; Vessey, Iris

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5915.1999.tb01613.x

Cited by 504 publications

(395 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Previous studies suggest that introducing an interrupting task distracts a worker from the primary task and thus decreases the accuracy of decisions and increases error rates (Bailey and Konstan, 2006;Speier et al, 1999). In line with previous work, our mediation analysis demonstrated that people tend to make more errors when they were exposed to a variety of outdoor activities, thus slowing down their overall data-entry task and damaging their productivity.…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Rainmakers: Why bad weather means good productivity.

Lee¹,

Gino²,

Staats³

2014

Journal of Applied Psychology

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People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just the opposite. Drawing on cognitive psychology research, we propose that bad weather increases individual productivity by eliminating potential cognitive distractions resulting from good weather. When the weather is bad, individuals may focus more on their work rather than thinking about activities they could engage in outside of work. We tested our hypotheses using both field and lab data. First, we use field data on employees' productivity from a mid-size bank in Japan, which we then match with daily weather data to investigate the effect of bad weather conditions (in terms of precipitation, visibility, and temperature) on productivity. Second, we use a laboratory experiment to examine the psychological mechanism explaining the relationship between bad weather and increased productivity. Our findings support our proposed model and suggest that worker productivity is higher on bad rather than good weather days. We discuss the implications of our findings for workers and managers.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Rainmakers: Why bad weather means good productivity.

Lee¹,

Gino²,

Staats³

2014

Journal of Applied Psychology

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“…If they were interrupted twice, tasks took significantly longer again than if there was only one interruption. This is consistent with Speier et al's (1999) finding that performance time on their task increased as interruption frequency increased.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…However in Speier et al's (1999) experiment, it is possible that there was less necessity than in the previous studies for participants to hold the content of the on-going task in memory during the interruption. Speier et al argue that the dissimilar content is disruptive because it demands extra information processing operations from the ones that have already been in use.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…There is a relative lack of published, well controlled experimental studies on this topic, but from the limited data available, it appears that interruptions can have a deleterious effect on performance of both single tasks (Eyrolle & Cellier, 2000;Speier et al, 1999) and on "errand" tasks that, although simplified, have some similarities to a multitasking situation (Edwards & Gronlund, 1998;Gillie & Broadbent, 1989). However, they also show that interruptions will not inevitably disrupt performance and can even be beneficial in certain circumstances (Speier et al, 1999;Zijlstra et al, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resistance to the impact of interruptions during multitasking by healthy adults and dysexecutive patients

et al. 2004

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Two experiments (one with healthy adult volunteers and the other with controls and dysexecutive patients) assessed the impact of interruptions on a novel test of multitasking.The test involved switching repeatedly between four tasks (block construction, bead threading, paper folding, alphabetical searching) over a 10 minute period. In Experiment 1, there were 4 groups of 20 healthy participants. One group attempted multitasking with no interruption, a second group was interrupted early in the test, a third group late in the test and a fourth group was interrupted both early and late. Interruption involved carrying out a fifth, unexpected task for a period of one minute before returning to the four main tasks. There was no difference in multitasking performance between the groups. In Experiment 2 the participants were seven dysexecutive patients and 14 age-matched controls. A repeated measures approach was employed to assess the impact of two interruptions (early and late) for both groups. Contrary to predictions, the patients as well as controls were resistant to the effects of interruptions, despite their clearly impaired multitasking performance. These results suggest that the ability to deal with interruptions may be separable from the ability to organise and execute multiple tasks within a limited time frame.

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“…23]. This literature 4 shows that, although in some occasions interruptions facilitate task performance [31], their behavioural, cognitive, motivational and affective consequences are most often detrimental [1,5,6,34]. Importantly, these consequences may vary depending on the interruption characteristics [5,34].…”

Section: Interruption Research Outside the Pain Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%