Feeling interrupted—Being responsive: How online messages relate to affect at work

• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2239
• Published date: 01 March 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Feeling interrupted—Being responsive: How online messages

relate to affect at work

Sabine Sonnentag

1

|Leonard Reinecke

2

|Jutta Mata

1

|Peter Vorderer

1

1

University of Mannheim, Mannheim,

Germany

2

University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

Correspondence

Sabine Sonnentag, Department of Psychology,

University of Mannheim, Schloss Ehrenhof

Ost, D‐68131 Mannheim, Germany.

Email: sonnentag@uni‐mannheim.de

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 inter-

ruptions 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 per-

ceived 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 mes-

sages 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.

KEYWORDS

affect, daily survey, e ‐mail, interruptions

1|INTRODUCTION

Using e‐mail and other online messages is ubiquitous in many contem-

porary jobs. In 2015, worldwide 112.5 billion business e‐mails were

sent and received per day, corresponding to 88 e‐mails received and

34 e‐mails sent per user per day (The Radicati Group, 2015). Despite

the increase in job‐related use of social media (El Ouirdi, El Ouirdi,

Segers, & Henderickx, 2015; Skeels & Grudin, 2009) and the insight

that e‐mail might not be the best communication medium for many

purposes (Middleton & Cukier, 2006; Tan, Sutanto, Phang, & Gasimov,

2014), e‐mail is still widely used on the job. For instance, knowledge

workers spend 28% of their workday reading and responding to e‐mail

(Chui et al., 2012). Accordingly, Barley, Meyerson, and Grodal (2011, p.

887) have characterized e‐mail as a “source and symbol of stress.”

Research in the organizational and information sciences has often

looked at e‐mail and other online messages from such a stress per-

spective (Barber & Santuzzi, 2015) and has examined how these mes-

sages relate to interruptions of ongoing work (González & Mark,

2004; Jackson, Dawson, & Wilson, 2001; Mark, Iqbal, Czerwinski,

Johns, & Sano, 2016). Interruptions, in turn, have been described as

compromising task performance and eliciting negative affective states

(Mark, Gudith, & Klocke, 2008; Marulanda‐Carter & Jackson, 2012).

Wajcman and Rose (2011), however, have argued that approaches

that see e‐mail and other online messages exclusively as disruptive

may miss an important feature of many modern work settings where

“constant connectivity”(p. 941) is widespread. On the basis of quali-

tative data, Wajcman and Rose described that being available and

responsive to incoming messages is highly important to get work

done. Despite these insights, there is a paucity of research that inte-

grates this new perspective with the more traditional negative view

on interruptions. Specifically, it remains unclear how the potentially

negative and positive consequences of being interrupted are jointly

experienced on a day‐to‐day basis, how they translate into other neg-

ative and positive on‐the‐job experiences (e.g., time pressure and per-

ceived task accomplishment, respectively), and how they ultimately

relate to negative and positive affect as highly relevant outcome var-

iables in organizational behavior (Ashkanasy & Dorris, 2017). In this

study, we aim at reconciling earlier research on interruptions that

focused on negative outcomes (Mark et al., 2008) with the more

recent perspective featuring a more positive view (Wajcman & Rose,

2011). We develop and test a model that describes how interruptions

by e‐mail messages and responsiveness towards these messages are

linked to negative and positive affect at work. Specifically, we pro-

pose that interruptions are related to negative affect via time pressure

Received: 24 March 2016 Revised: 16 August 2017 Accepted: 3 September 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2239

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:369–383. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 369