Time in the New Economy: The Impact of the Interaction of Individual and Structural Temporalities on Job Satisfaction

The 24/7 economy creates new organizational temporalities including a temporal structure called layered‐task time (LTT), characterized by greater simultaneity, fragmentation, contamination, and constraint. This paper develops a measure of LTT, and examines the relationship between its components and job satisfaction as moderated by an individual's polychronicity, or propensity for multitasking. A total of 306 employees from various jobs, organizations, and industries were surveyed. The LTT measures provide promising initial evidence of reliability and content validity. We also find that those who are more polychronic are more satisfied in environments characterized by a need for multitasking and using dissimilar skills, as well as organizational temporal constraint and unpredictable shifts in temporal boundaries. Finally, we discuss implications for research on temporal structures in the workplace.