Don’t interrupt me! An examination of the relationship between intrusions at work and employee strain.

Abstract

Interruptions by others, or intrusions, are a common phenomenon in

Development and validation of the Workplace Interruptions Measure

“…The first is a single item within the Organizational Constraints Scale (OCS; Spector & Jex, ). This item specifically assesses the frequency with which “you find it difficult or impossible to do your job because of interruptions by other people.” The second attempt is a four‐item scale assessing intrusions (Lin et al, ). In addition to providing a more comprehensive measure of all interruption dimensions, our measure differs from previous work in several ways.…”

“…Specifically, Study 3 explored the construct validity and incremental validity of the WIM with workplace stressors and strains to understand whether the WIM subscales differentially predict stressors and strains in a new sample of employees. Study 3 also included a previously existing measure of intrusions (Lin et al, ) to examine convergent validity with the WIM‐intrusions subscale.…”

“…A four‐item intrusions measure (developed by Lin et al, ) was included in this study (α = .94). An example item reads, “I am frequently interrupted by others.” Response options range from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree .…”

The myth of subtle notifications

“…There exists a vast body of literature that has studied the trade off between disruption and awareness caused by notifications [4,3,1,2]. However these works primarily focused on workplace environments where the user is engaged with some computational task at hand and notifications are delivered to the desktop computer.…”

Take Control of Interruptions in Your Life: Lessons from Routine Activity Theory of Criminology

“…Other researchers have shown that it requires 25 minutes to resume a primary task after an interruption [4] affecting work quality [5]. Repeated interruptions also increase anxiety, exhaustion, and annoyance [6].…”