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At the time of the initial submission of this dissertation all three papers had been submitted to peer review journals to be considered for publication. All three papers are reproduced here in full, with minor alterations to fit the formatting guidelines of the thesis. The papers all have Andre Lanctot as the first author and Dr. Linda Duxbury (Supervisor of this thesis) as the co-author. Dr. Linda Duxbury provided guidance throughout the research process in the form of feedback. She engaged in discussions about research decisions and direction by offering her wisdom and experience (including helping to prevent many mistakes). She assisted with her connections for finding organizational partners and assisted in the data analysis where a second researcher was needed. She also provided editorial support. There were no other co-authors for these three papers. I, Andre Lanctot, I'm the sole author of this thesis and was fully involved in every step of the research. All interviews were conducted by me and all surveys where administered by me. I conducted the data collection, preparation (removing outliers, missing data, etc.), and the main data analysis. I was also responsible for preparing and writing up the materials presented in each paper. When citing this dissertation please reference it as, Lanctot, A. (2019). You've Got Mail, But Is It Important And/Or Urgent?: An Investigation into Employees' Perceptions of Email (Doctoral Dissertation).

This paper presents the results of a study designed to identify the cues employees use to identify an email as important and/or urgent. Taking an emic perspective, a qualitative research methodology is used to analyze interview responses from knowledge workers. Our findings support the notion that employees use strategies similar to those encapsulated in Mitchell et al.'s (1997) operationalization of stakeholder salience when evaluating an email's importance and/or urgency. Results from this study can be used to design email policies to support knowledge worker performance.

This article was motivated by the lack of research, and research instruments, informing academics and practitioners on the email factors used by knowledge workers when triaging their email. This article reports on the development and validation of two measures that categorize the types of emails employees send/receive into two different constructs based on the perceived importance and importance and urgency. The measures were developed using Buss and Craik’s Act Frequency Approach. Analysis determined that our six-item important email and our eight-item important and urgent email scales were both reliable and valid measures of the constructs. Construct validity was demonstrated by embedding our measures in a nomological network linking email demands to employee well-being. The measures were found to be significant predictors of work-role overload, even when the more traditional measures used to quantify the demands imposed on employees by email were taken into account. Lay Summary This article presents two scales that can be used to measure the extent to which an employee perceives an email to be: (a) important and (b) both important and urgent. As expected by theory, both measures were found to predict employees’ feelings of being overloaded by their work. The interesting findings from this study are the following. First, employees seem to consider urgent emails to be important, perhaps without consideration to the email’s actual importance to the employee. Second, emails that are both important and urgent usually involve a key stakeholder being impacted if the email is not acted on quickly. Third, important emails are not necessarily considered urgent. To make an email urgent the sender has to explicitly state how the contents of the email will negatively impact key stakeholders. Finally, our findings suggest that reducing the volume of email someone has to process may not, on its own, lead to reduced employee stress. Rather, employers who seek to improve employee well-being should focus their efforts on reducing the volume of emails employees consider to be important and both important and urgent.