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Feeling interrupted—Being responsive: How online messages relate to affect at work
Author(s) -
Sonnentag Sabine,
Reinecke Leonard,
Mata Jutta,
Vorderer Peter
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.2239
Subject(s) - affect (linguistics) , psychology , feeling , task (project management) , social psychology , association (psychology) , test (biology) , computer assisted web interviewing , applied psychology , communication , paleontology , business , management , marketing , economics , psychotherapist , biology
Summary Being constantly connected to others via e‐mail and other online messages is increasingly typical for many employees. In this paper, we develop and test a model that specifies how interruptions by online messages relate to negative and positive affect. We hypothesize that perceived interruptions by online messages predict state negative affect via time pressure and that perceived interruptions predict state positive affect via responsiveness to these online messages and perceived task accomplishment. A daily survey study with 174 employees (a total of 811 day‐level observations) provided support for our hypotheses at the between‐person and within‐person level. In addition, perceived interruptions showed a negative direct association with perceived task accomplishment. Our study highlights the importance of being responsive to online messages and shows that addressing only the negative effects of perceived interruptions does not suffice to understand the full impact of interruptions by online messages in modern jobs.