Permanent Urgency and Techno-Distress at Work

Over the past 40 years, companies have been digitalising on a massive scale, with the aim of increasing their performance and work rate. However, the ambivalent nature of technologies is debated in the literature (Loup et al., 2020). Thus, technologies allow for the simplification of processes and the acceleration of production, but they also are a factor of permanent urgency within companies (Aubert, 2018)

The Importance of who and what in Interruption Management: Empirical Evidence from a Cell Phone Use Study

Interruption management in technology mediated communication is a key concern in collaborative work and social environments. Previous empirical and theoretical work in predicting interruptibility predominantly focuses on interruptee’s local context namely identifying cognitively and socially intruding contexts such as mental work load levels, activity, place of activity. They largely ignore the relational context namely “who” the interruption is from or “what” it is about. This paper addresses this issue by systematically investigating the use of the various contextual factors in interruption management practices of everyday cell phone use. Analysis of 1201 incoming calls from our experience sampling method study of cell phone use, shows that “who” is calling is used most of the time (87.4%) by individuals to make deliberate call handling decisions (N=834), in contrast to the interruptee’s current local social (34.9%) or cognitive (43%) contexts. We present implications of these findings for the design of interruption management tools for communication media

Technology Overload: Gender-based Perceptions of Knowledge Worker Performance

Gender studies show numerous differences between genders in regard to technology, and emphasize that women areunderrepresented in IT-related academic programs and careers. Because technology is so prevalent in our workforce,it is important to study how technology usage affects white-collared working women. We explore the relationshipbetween three dimensions of technology overload and knowledge worker job performance (stratified by gender)through a quantitative analysis. Our results show that female knowledge workers perceive a more significant andnegative relationship than men between technology overload and job performance even when they do not relyheavily on technology in the workplace. Addressing technology overload may thus positively impact women’scareer development

Human-Computer Negotiations: A Systematic Evaluation of the Effects of Timespan, Tactic, and Search Mechanism

Artificial Intelligence and Computer Agents are having a substantial impact on our everyday lives. The current paper focuses on the prospects of humans negotiating with computer agents in e-commerce settings. We conducted experiments where the subjects negotiated the purchase of mobile plans with computer agents acting as sellers. Three time-based negotiation tactics and two search mechanisms were employed in synchronous vs. asynchronous sessions. The results suggest that computer agents’ negotiation tactics and search mechanisms have significant effects on both the subjective and objective outcomes of the negotiations, while timespan has marginal effects on the agreement rate of the negotiation

Designing Attention-aware Business Intelligence and Analytics Dashboards to Support Task Resumption

External interruptions are a common phenomenon in today’s working environment. Specifically, attentional shifts in working environments lead to task resumption failures that refer to the improper resuming of a primary task after an interruption and negatively influencing the individual performance of employees. Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) systems are well recognized as an essential concept to support decision making of employees. One important and frequently used BI&A system component are dashboards. BI&A dashboards enable collecting, summarizing, and presenting business information from different resources to decision makers. When working with BI&A dashboards, interruptions and resulting task resumption failures have negative consequences on decision-making processes. This research in progress paper addresses this problem and provides design knowledge for attention-aware BI&A dashboards that support users during task resumption. We follow a Design Science Research (DSR) approach and derive theory-grounded design principles for task resumption support on BI&A dashboards. Moreover, to evaluate the suggested principles, an instantiation is realized. In our instantiation, real-time tracking of eye-movement data is used to capture visual attention of the users and provide visual feedback after task resumption. We introduce testable hypotheses and present preliminary results of a pre-test lab experiment

Personal Life Interrupted: Understanding the Effects of Technology-Mediated Interruptions from Work to Personal Life

This study examines how technology-mediated work-related interruptions affect people’s personal life in terms of the level of work-life conflict they experience and their ability to fulfill the responsibilities of their personal life. Based on interruption source, we differentiate between two types of interruptions that occur in one’s personal life: other-initiated and self-initiated. Drawing on interruption research and micro-role transition theories, we conceptualize distinct effects of the two interruption types on outcome variables. Data were collected through surveys from 137 knowledge workers. The results reveal distinct effects of other-initiated and self-initiated interruptions on personal life. The frequency of other-initiated interruptions is found to be positively associated with work-life conflict and negatively associated with fulfillment of personal life responsibilities, whereas the frequency of self-initiated interruptions does not significantly affect personal life. The results also suggest that the effects of other-initiated interruptions on fulfillment of personal life responsibilities are partially mediated by work-life conflict. The study concludes with implications for research and practice