Excuse me, do you have a minute? An exploration of the dark- and bright-side effects of daily work interruptions for employee well-being.

Abstract

Work intrusions-unexpected interruptions by other people that interrupt ongoing work, bringing it to a temporary halt-are common in today's workplaces. Prior research has focused on the task-based aspect of work intrusions and largely cast intrusions as events that harm employee well-being in general and job satisfaction in particular. We suggest that apart from their task-based aspect, work intrusions also involve a social aspect-interaction with the interrupter-that can have beneficial effects for interrupted employees' well-being. Using self-regulation theory, we hypothesize that while work intrusions' self-regulatory demands of switching tasks, addressing the intrusion, and resuming the original task can deplete selfregulatory resources, interaction with the interrupter can simultaneously fulfill one's need for belongingness. Self-regulatory resource depletion and belongingness are hypothesized to mediate the negative and positive effects of work intrusions onto job satisfaction, respectively, with belongingness further buffering the negative effect of self-regulatory resource depletion on job satisfaction. Results of our 3-week experience sampling study with 111 participants supported these hypotheses at the within-individual level, even as we included stress as an alternate mediator. Overall, by extending our focus onto the social component of work intrusions, and modeling the mechanisms that transmit the dark-and the bright-side effects of work intrusions onto job satisfaction simultaneously, we provide a balanced view of this workplace phenomenon. In the process, we challenge the consensus that work intrusions harm job satisfaction by explaining why and when intrusions may also boost job satisfaction, thus extending the recent research on work intrusions' positive effects.

Oops, I did it (again)! The emotional experience, interpersonal responses, and relational consequences of social gaffes in the workplace

“…For instance, by drawing employees' attention away from their work and onto the social gaffe episode, social gaffes could act as work interruptions that distract employees, resulting in low performance or poor quality of work (Puranik et al, 2020). It is also possible that trying to not think too much about the social gaffe and forcing oneself to focus on one's work is a depleting experience that results in lowered performance or job satisfaction (Leroy, 2009; Puranik et al, in press). We invite researchers to explore these possibilities to advance our knowledge of social gaffes.…”

The Cost of Excessive Smartphone Use: Guilt Cross the Work-Family Domains

“…We recruited participants from a wide variety of organizations with the snowball sampling technique, that is the initial participants were invited from an MBA program, and then they recommended to others who might be interested in this study ( Puranik et al, 2021 ). The enrolled participants need to live with at least one family member, in order to have opportunity of displaying family role performance.…”

“…All survey items were self-reported, because we mainly focus on employees’ experience and subsequent response. Research also showed that when it comes to such state variables, it is acceptable for using the same-source data ( Puranik et al, 2021 ).…”

Can I Get Back Later or Turn It Off? Day-Level Effect of Remote Communication Autonomy on Sustainable Proactivity

“…Recent ESM studies [45,46] recommend the minimum of three data points per person for statistically analyzing within-person, day-level relationships. In line with this recommendation, we included participants who completed at least 3 of the 10 daily surveys in our analysis by removing 5 respondents who contributed fewer than 3 complete daily data points.…”

“…This approach allows for the simultaneous estimation of path coefficients for the hypothesized relationships considering the day-and person-level variances. Specifically, the effects of the within-person, day-level study variables (i.e., remote communication autonomy, positive affect, and proactive behaviors) and control variable (i.e., sleep quality) were modeled as random slopes at Level 1 [46,53]. The betweenperson moderator (i.e., techno-workload) and controls (i.e., job autonomy and demographic characteristics) were modeled as Level-2 constructs that exert cross-level effects on Level-1 variables and relationships.…”