A Daily Diary Study on Sleep Quality and Procrastination at Work: The Moderating Role of Trait Self-Control

Background: This daily diary study investigates the relation between sleep quality during the night and its effect on procrastination at work during the next workday. Previous research has shown that sleep quality is an important variable for work behavior at the daily level, including employee performance, safety, health, and attitudes, such as work engagement. Also, sleep quality has been found to be negatively related to next-day work procrastination. However, these studies did not address trait differences that may be involved. In other words, they have not investigated whether all employees experience the effects of sleep quality on procrastination similarly. We explore the moderating effect of trait self-control.Methods: Seventy one full-time employees (51% male) working in various industries participated, including finance or banking (17%), government or education (13%), construction (7%), health care (7%), sales or marketing (6%), and others. Average age was 35.20 years (SD = 12.74), and average employment tenure was 13.3 years (SD = 13.16). Participants completed a one-shot general electronic questionnaire (to assess trait self-control, using a four-item scale adapted from Tangney et al., 2004). Subsequently, these employees received two daily electronic questionnaires to assess sleep quality (measured with one item from the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (Buysse et al., 1989), and a three-item scale of procrastination (adapted from Tuckman, 1991) over the course of 10 workdays, resulting in 465 pairs of matched morning-afternoon measurements (65% response).Results: Results of multilevel regression analyses showed that sleep quality was negatively related to work procrastination the next day. Sleep quality, however, also interacted with trait self-control in impacting work procrastination, such that low sleep quality affected employees low in trait self-control, but not employees high in trait self-control.Conclusion: The findings of this study qualify earlier research showing the relation between procrastination and sleep quality. We show that the relation is only present for those who have low trait self-control; employees with high trait self-control tend to be immune to low sleep quality. Thus, general advice or interventions to improve sleep quality may be restricted to a selection of employees that are truly affected

Procrastination : self-regulation in initiating aversive goals

Procrastination is a common phenomenon that is easily recognised as one of the behaviours involved in not doing and avoiding work. However, work motivation theories have not devoted much attention to why people don't do things at work. Just as the study of abnormal behaviour is used to understand normal behaviour, so can the study of procrastination enhance the understanding of self-regulation. In this paper, procrastination is defined as the avoidance of the implementation of an intention. It is characterised by the avoidance of the intention and the preference for behaviour or thoughts that distract from the aversiveness of the intention. Individual difference variables, processes, and conditions are identified. Strategies to overcome procrastination are suggested

Fault diagnosis of electrical power systems using incremental radial basis function nets

Most of the proposed neural networks for fault diagnosis of systems are multilayer perceptrons (MLP) employing the popular backpropagation (BP) learning rule. It has been shown that the backpropagation algorithm usually takes a long time for convergence and sometimes gets trapped into local minimum. The algorithm requires the architecture to be fixed initially (i.e. the number of hidden units) before learning begins. Final network size is obtained by repeated trials. When the size of the training set is large, especially in the case of fault diagnosis, such a repeated training consumes a large amount of time and sometimes it can be frustrating. Thus there is a need of a good neural network architecture that decides its size automatically while learning the input/output relationships and must posses reasonably good generalization. Neural networks based on radial basis functions (RBF) have emerged as potential alternatives to MLPs. RBFs have a simple architecture and they can learn the input/output relations fast compared to MLPs. In this paper we present a constructive neural network based on radial basis functions (RBF) due to Fritzke for classification of fault patterns in a model power system. The performance of this neural network with traditional BP network and nonconstructive RBF network in terms of size, learning speed and generalization are presente

Planning new ideas: Does time management tendency benefit daily creativity?

We studied the relation between time management tendency and daily creativity in a diary study among 68 R&D engineers reporting on 412 workdays. The direct effect of time management tendency on daily creativity was positive, and the effect on its dispersion was negative. Theorizing that time management frees up cognitive and affective resources, we tested the mediating effect of concentration and positive affect in the relation between time management tendency and daily creativity at work. Multilevel analyses showed some support for an indirect effect of concentration, but not for an indirect effect of positive affect. In our analyses, we controlled for innovative cognitive style. Overall, we conclude that time management tendency provides benefits for daily creativity at work

The effect of interruptions and breaks on insight and impasses : do you need a break right now?

Some time away from a problem, or incubation time, is found to be beneficial to creative problem solving. But are interruptions as equally helpful as breaks? An experiment was conducted to gain more insight into the differences between imposed and self-initiated breaks, and their effects on creativity, specifically on impasses and insights. There were three experimental conditions, (a) a continuous condition, in which participants were not allowed to switch back and forth between tasks, (b) an interruption condition, in which participants had to switch tasks at a predetermined moment, and (c) a break condition, in which participants could switch tasks at their own discretion. Results showed that taking breaks at moments chosen at one's own discretion led to solving more insight problems and reaching fewer impasses than at moments that were chosen by others. Furthermore, compared to working continuously, interruptions led to fewer impasses, but not to solving more insight problems

How project groups achieve coordinated action: A model of shared cognitions on time

This chapter addresses how project teams achieve coordinated action, given the diversity in how team members may perceive and value time. Although synchronization of task activities may occur spontaneously through the nonconscious process of entrainment, some work conditions demand that team members pay greater conscious attention to time to coordinate their efforts. We propose that shared cognitions on time – the agreement among team members on the appropriate temporal approach to their collective task – will contribute to the coordination of team members’ actions, particularly in circumstances where nonconscious synchronization of action patterns is unlikely. We suggest that project teams may establish shared cognitions on time through goal setting, temporal planning, and temporal reflexivity