Is Electronic Multitasking Always Viewed as a Counterproductive Meeting Behavior? Understanding the Nature of the Secondary Task

Abstract

This project explored social evaluations of electronic multitasking during work meetings, including factors that may affect whether it is seen as a counterproductive meeting behavior. We used an experimental vignette design to test whether social evaluations (norm violating, agency, and communalism) of a hypothetical coworker’s electronic multitasking differed by whether the secondary task was relevant to the meeting (Study 1; N = 274) or ambiguous (Study 2; N = 188). Observers evaluated task-irrelevant multitasking as more of a norm violation and less communal compared to task-relevant multitasking, and work-related tasks were evaluated as more agentic than nonwork-related tasks. Ambiguous tasks were also rated as more agentic than task-irrelevant multitasking. Taken together, our results show that the nature of the secondary task reduces negative perceptions of coworkers’ electronic multitasking behavior during meetings. However, electronic multitasking for any purpose, even if relevant, was generally judged negatively consistent with expectations for a counterproductive meeting behavior.

Keywords

Counterproductive meeting behaviors (CMBs)social judgments norm violation agency communalism

Introduction

Meetings play an important role in companies and work teams. Approximately 11 million meetings take place daily in the U.S. alone (Allen et al., 2008), and employees report spending approximately 6 hours every week in meetings (Rogelberg et al., 2006). Meetings provide a multitude of benefits, allowing team members to brainstorm innovative solutions to problems, discuss new information, and propose new ideas (Elsayed-Elkhouly et al., 1997). However, employees judge almost half of workplace meetings as ineffective (Shanock et al., 2013), with an estimated $37 billion lost in time and resources (Sheridan, 1989). With organizations generally investing up to 15% of their personnel budget on meetings (Doyle & Strauss, 1982), ineffective meeting time can add up to long term organizational losses.

One reason for unproductive meetings may be due to counterproductive meeting behaviors (CMBs; Allen et al., 2015). CMBs include dysfunctional behaviors that hinder progress towards achieving group goals (Allen et al., 2015; Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012; Kauffeld & Meyers, 2009; Schulte et al., 2013). Examples include arriving late for the meeting, engaging in side-conversations, or discussing topics that are not relevant to the meeting as a whole (Allen et al, 2015). Employees who witnessed CMBs are less likely to voice their opinions or concerns about the organization and rated their coworkers less trustworthy (Allen et al., 2015). Given that both employee voice and trust are critical for both team performance and organizational performance (Brown et al., 2015; De Jong et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2010; Ng & Feldman, 2012), CMBs have longer reaching consequences on performance outcomes beyond the meeting, such as team productivity and organizational success (Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012).

The aforementioned literature underscores the notion that employee perceptions of their coworkers and workplace relationships are increasingly important (Lovelace et al., 2001) given increases in team-oriented work environments (Chi et al., 2009). Employee perceptions of their coworkers can also act as a catalyst for their attitudes and future behaviors. For example, employee perceptions of unfairness can lead to engaging in counterproductive behavior themselves (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). Further, employees who perceive that they have been the victim of counterproductive behavior (e.g., incivility) tend to retaliate with similar behavior leading to a cycle of escalating violence and a toxic environment (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Thus, more research is needed to understand task characteristics that can affect social judgements of CMBs in the workplace.

This study aims to examine one potential CMB that is highly relevant in today’s modern technology-driven and fast-moving organizations (Watson-Manheim & Bélanger, 2007) —electronic multitasking. This type of multitasking behavior involves rapid task switching using information technologies (Rubinstein et al., 2001), such as using instant message to communicate with others while attending a meeting. People who engage in electronic multitasking in the workplace can be seen as rude (Applebaum et al., 2008) because they are not giving their attention to the meeting at hand or sufficiently contributing. However, multitasking behavior is also valued by organizations (Judd, 2013; Kleinman, 2009) if employees are trying to get additional information that is pertinent to the topic at hand. Especially in North America, being a productive worker requires multitasking skills (Manhart, 2004) because “multitasking has become synonymous with the communication infused workplace of today” (Turner & Reinsch, 2007, p. 36). This type of behavior is especially common in meetings (Hasenberg & Machovsky, 2015); more than 75% of multitasking activity is on distracting tasks not relevant to the meeting (Benbunan-Fich & Truman, 2009). Yet when an employee is engaging in electronic multitasking during a meeting, how do their coworkers perceive such behavior?

One group of researchers have proposed that individuals in group settings – such as meetings – generally tend to multitask on task-relevant issues, and this will lead to more positive evaluations compared to those multitasking on task-irrelevant issues (Bell et al., 2005). However, these claims have yet to be empirically tested. Building on theoretical propositions from this paper, we use an experimental vignette design to explore how social judgments of a coworkers’ electronic multitasking during a team meeting (i.e., the primary in-person task) may differ based on the activity conducted using technology (i.e., the secondary online task). Below, we expand on the idea of secondary task relevance in electronic multitasking in terms of how a task might vary with respect to team goals (vs. personal goals) and work-orientation (vs. non-work orientation).

Social judgments of electronic multitasking and task relevance

Multitasking behavior in work meetings is often easily observed by others in the group, so it is an example of a social behavior that can be evaluated by others who are present. According to expectancy violation theory (Burgoon, 1993), our interpretations of others’ behaviors is based on what we anticipate happening in given social situations. These expectations are based on the other party involved, the relationship with them, and norms for what is considered appropriate to the situation. Violations can be perceived negatively or positively depending on potential rewards the observer perceives from that behavior – termed reward valence. For instance, patiently standing in line at a busy coffee shop to wait your turn is expected. If someone behind you cuts in front of you, this violation has negative reward valence leading to negative judgments. Alternatively, someone who gives up their spot in front of you would be a violation that has positive reward valence that leads to positive social judgments. Early work in this area focused on evaluations of nonverbal communication issues like respecting personal space in physical interactions, but this theory has expanded to also include verbal communication and observation of behaviors (Burgoon, 2015). Examples in the technology behavior context include, negative perceptions cell phone use during face-to face interactions (e.g., phubbing, a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing”; Hall et al., 2014; Miller-Ott & Kelly, 2015; Vanden Abeele et al., 2016) and interpretations of various social media behaviors (Bevan et al., 2014; Rui & Stefanone, 2018).

The organizational context also provides an opportunity for employee behaviors to be judged by others in a shared social setting, and thus also carries specific expectations for behavior. Coworker reactions to multitasking behavior should be based on expectations about how people should behave during meetings, so observing deviations from those expectations can lead to both negative and positive interpretations. Research suggests that the typical norm for a meeting context is to pay attention and participate (Benbunan-Fich, 2012; Camacho et al., 2013). If employees are using technology to multitask during a meeting, coworker observers may construe this behavior as placing more importance on other matters (Camacho et al., 2013). Thus, coworkers may view attending to non-work tasks while in a meeting as violating social norms and self-serving to the target employee (Cumiskey, 2005; Ellis et al., 2010), which coincides with the idea of negative reward valence. Indeed, one study found that 97% of participants perceived that using technology in a social situation was essentially not paying attention, and thus was considered rude behavior (Schulte et al., 2012), even if the nature of the multitasking was unknown. Another study found that electronic multitasking was evaluated as ruder when the secondary task was irrelevant (De Bruin & Barber, 2019). Bringing one’s private life into the public workspace by using technology to focus on a different task could be seen as not adhering to one’s role and situational norms (Cumiskey, 2005), especially if the secondary task is not relevant to the task at hand because it is seen as not valuable to the observer. However, these social evaluations of the electronic multitasker might change in a work setting depending on whether the secondary task is not just relevant to the primary task, but also relevant to general work activities (i.e., work versus non-work orientation) or work team members more broadly (i.e., team goal versus personal goal).

For example, working on multiple tasks simultaneously could be judged positively if it is done to support meeting processes, which qualifies as a work-related, shared team goal. Contrary to CMBs, meeting citizenship behaviors involve actions such as coming to the meeting prepared, volunteering information, and assisting with problem solving. They are functional behaviors that can contribute to employee satisfaction with meetings and effectiveness (Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012), thus representing behaviors with the potential for positive reward valence to the observer. Electronic multitasking can be considered a citizenship behavior when there are benefits to using technology in the workplace, which may hinge on the idea of secondary task relevance—is the employee working on another task that is directly relevant to the primary task?

Researchers have broadly posited that the relevance of the secondary task during electronic multitasking may reduce negative evaluations of such behavior (Bell et al., 2005), but this idea has received limited empirical work to date. Only one study has demonstrated that electronic multitasking that is relevant to the primary task at hand was evaluated more positively by observers in a vignette study (De Bruin & Barber, 2019) demonstrating that norm violations can be evaluated positively when associated with a positive reward. However, this study only compared a nonwork-related, personal goal task (web surfing and emails with friends) reason for multitasking to a work-related shared team goal task (web surfing and emails relevant to team project). To extend this work, we propose that there are two key additional characteristics that might support perceptions of task relevance. First, does the secondary task contribute to team goals in the shared meeting setting? Second, does the secondary task relate to the broader work setting rather than nonwork setting? We anticipate these factors further specify the amount of potential reward valence to the observer, with team goals in the work setting being evaluated most positively.

For example, employees can send emails during the meeting to their fellow team members (supporting team goals), that are work-related (sharing meeting notes) or nonwork- related (planning an upcoming happy hour for the work team). Similarly, employees can send emails during the meeting to their personal contacts (supporting personal goals) that are either work-related (interacting with other coworkers about other projects) or non-work related (planning an upcoming happy hour with personal friends). Within these characteristics, electronic multitasking for work-related team goals qualifies as being fully task-relevant with the highest positive reward valence as secondary activity because it is work-related and directly linked to the primary task (shared team goal). The other three combinations represent task-irrelevance for the meeting goals, although emails related to nonwork-team goals should carry at least some positive reward valence. However, nonwork-related personal goals would represent the most task-irrelevant condition with a negative reward valence because it does not socially include the group members nor is it work-related communication.

Using the aforementioned conditions, we explored to what extent electronic multitasking during a work meeting will be evaluated as less of a norm violation, agentic, and communal by a hypothetical coworker. Norm violations tend to be associated with rudeness (Stephens & Davis, 2009), a social judgment related to counterproductive meeting behaviors (Allen et al., 2015). We also explored if the electronic multitasker would be viewed as less agentic (i.e., unproductive) and less communal (i.e., cooperative; Adler & Benbunan-Fich, 2012), as these are also key judgments that might be suggestive of counterproductive meeting behavior evaluations. Both these evaluations carry importance in a modern organization as communion-like traits tend to involve social connection and acceptance, which are closely tied to teamwork (Abele et al., 2008), whereas agentic traits emphasize skills and competencies. Alternatively, evaluating electronic multitasking behaviors as being considerate, productive, and cooperative would suggest it is not a counterproductive meeting behavior (and perhaps even indicative of good task performance or citizenship behavior in work teams; Buser & Peter, 2012; Gonzalez & Mark, 2004; Wasson, 2004).

Study 1: Task relevance

Study 1 compared one task-relevant condition to three types of task-irrelevant conditions. In the task-relevant condition, the electronic multitasker’s secondary task was related to helping the team achieve work-related goals (i.e., emailing fellow team members in attendance with notes on the meeting). In the secondary task-irrelevant conditions, the electronic multitasker was engaging in a secondary task that was either (a) work-related but not relevant to the team members (i.e., emailing other coworkers about projects irrelevant to the meeting), (b) not work-related but relevant to the other team members (i.e., emailing team members about a happy hour), or (c) both not work related and irrelevant to the team members (i.e., emailing personal friends about a happy hour).

We held meeting norms consistent for all workers by explicitly mentioning that everyone was using laptops to take notes in the meeting. Organizational norms in turn influence how information technologies are used by employees (Fulk, 1995; Watson-Manheim & Bélanger, 2007). While the primary task norms are held consistent, employees may judge their coworkers’ secondary tasks differently based on contextual factors. Based on propositions from Bell et al. (2005), we hypothesized that task-relevant electronic multitasking related to the work meeting will be evaluated as less norm violating, more agentic, and more communal than task-irrelevant forms of electronic multitasking.

Methods

Participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for a 2-minute survey being compensated at $.10 a survey. This strategy gave us access to a diverse group of participants compared to an undergraduate sample or an organizational sample (Henrich et al., 2010), while allowing us to maintain internal validity and external validity compared to other samples (Horton et al., 2011). A total of 252 participants was required to detect a medium effect size of 0.21 (Richard et al., 2003) at 80% power. We did not remove participants who skipped questions as per recommendations by Newman (2014) and attention checks were not included given the brief survey design (Maniaci & Rogge, 2014).

Participants were presented with one of four vignettes which described their coworkers multitasking for differing reasons using their laptop. The use of vignettes allows confidence in internal validity compared to nonexperimental research (Greenberg & Eskew, 1993) due to experimental control of independent variables to help support causal inferences (Aguinis & Bradley, 2014). These vignettes were adapted from previous research on electronic multitasking evaluations (De Bruin & Barber, 2019), with a focus on changes to the irrelevant task condition (i.e., differentiating between work vs. nonwork-related activities and personal vs. team goals in the secondary task). All of the vignettes described a meeting situation where a new product was being introduced to a marketing department that the participant was a part of. One of the four conditions denoted multitasking that was relevant to the task at hand during the project meeting (sending emails to all creative team members to share their meeting notes; relevant condition from De Bruin & Barber, 2019). The other three conditions all described irrelevant multitasking behaviors: nonwork-related, personal (sending emails to friends to plan an upcoming happy hour; only irrelevant condition from De Bruin & Barber, 2019), nonwork-related, team (sending emails to all creative team members to plan an upcoming happy hour), and work-related, personal (sending emails to other coworkers about projects that are unrelated to the creative team). Finally, they completed all measures below to assess their reactions towards the observed behavior and demographics.

Measures

Social judgments

Evaluations of the coworker’s behavior was assessed with 9 semantic differential items similar to past electronic multitasking research (De Bruin & Barber, 2019). Three items evaluated norm violation (inconsiderate-considerate; rude-polite; unacceptable-acceptable; α = .91), three items evaluated agency (inefficient-efficient; lazy-hardworking; unproductive-productive; α = .89), and three items evaluated communalism (competitive-cooperative; selfish-generous; untrustworthy-trustworthy; α = .76). They were all scored on a −3 to +3 semantic differential scale, with zero representing the neutral midpoint. The norm violation items were reverse coded so that higher values indicated more violation. Higher scores on agency and communalism also mean higher levels of those evaluations.

Demographics

We recruited 300 participants from MTurk and were left with a final sample of 274 participants after dropping those who had duplicate IDs or did not complete key study variables. The final sample had slightly more males (53.6% male) and a majority of White/Caucasian respondents (75.6% white/Caucasian). The sample was generally older than a college undergraduate population, and what we would expect from an MTurk population (M = 31.8, SD = 8.70). Most of the population (84.3%) was employed at least part-time, with 63.5% being employed full-time, which led us to believe that our results would be generalizable to a workplace context. Open materials and data can be found at https://tinyurl.com/ElectronicCMBs. We acknowledge that there is sufficient information on the provided webpage for an independent researcher to reproduce the reported methodology and results.

Results

Preliminary analyses

Participants were not excluded for missing data, nor was missing data replaced. Rather, we used all available data to represent the construct of interest (Newman, 2014). Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations for Study 1 variables are shown in Table 1. An alpha level of .05 (p-value) was used to determine statistical significance of associations.

Table 1.

Study 1 means, standard deviations, and correlations with confidence intervals.

Variable	M	SD	1	2	3	4
1. Norm violation	1.51	1.26
2. Agency	−0.89	1.39	−.66**
			[−.73, −.59]
3. Communalism	−0.75	1.11	−.76**	.64**
			[−.81, −.71]	[.57, .71]
4. Gender	1.46	0.50	.23**	−.10	−.14*
			[.11, .34]	[−.21, .02]	[−.26, −.02]
5. Age	31.78	8.70	.21**	−.12*	−.12*	.19**
			[.09, .32]	[−.24, −.01]	[−.24, −.01]	[.07, .30]

Note. M and SD are used to represent mean and standard deviation, respectively. Values in square brackets indicate the 95% confidence interval for each correlation.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

Across conditions, older workers evaluated the multitasking behavior as more norm violating (r = .21, p < .001), less agentic (r = −.12, p = .041), and less communal (r = −.12, p = .040). This follows what has been previously shown where younger Americans tended to engage in more multitasking compared to older members (Carrier et al., 2009). Younger workers may be less likely to share this negativity because they tend to describe multitasking as a “way of life” (Rosen, 2007). A similar pattern was seen for women, who had the same negativity towards multitasking and evaluated it as ruder (r = .23, p < .001), and less communal (r = −.14, p = .020).

Hypothesis testing

Group sizes were not equivalent which led to a violation of homogeneity in some instances. All group means for conditions are shown in Table 2 and Figure 1. In those cases, all omnibus one-way ANOVAs were followed up with Kruskal-Wallis tests and post-hoc Mann-Whitney U’s. To account for the inflation of Type 1 error rates, we used the Bonferroni correction method with an updated significance level of p = .008. However, given that these results corroborated the one-way ANOVAs, the non-parametric statistics are not presented here (Table 3). Additionally, we report effect sizes (Cohen’s d) to guide interpretation of small (0.20), medium (0.50), and large (0.80) effects (Cohen, 2013).

Table 2.

Study 1 group means for each outcome of interest.

	Task irrelevant conditions						Task relevant condition
	Nonwork-related personal goal ( N = 82)		Work-related personal goal ( N = 70)		Nonwork-related team goal ( N = 61)		Work-related team goal ( N = 61)
	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD
Agency	−1.37	1.10	−0.23	1.20	−1.44	1.19	−0.45	1.67
Communalism	−1.02	0.84	−0.72	1.06	−1.02	1.01	−0.16	1.34
Norm violation	1.69	1.12	1.5	1.17	1.91	1.11	0.89	1.45

Figure 1.

Differences across electronic multitasking conditions in Study 1.

Table 3.

Study 1 fixed-effects analysis of variance results for each outcome of interest.

Predictor	Sum of squares	df	Mean square	F	p	_Partial η²	_Partial η²90% CI[LL, UL]
Agency
(Intercept)	84.20	1	84.20	44.18	.000
Group	9.89	1	9.89	5.19	.023	.02	[.00, .05]
Error	518.42	272	1.91
Communalism
(Intercept)	83.45	1	83.45	71.72	.000
Group	17.51	1	17.51	15.05	.000	.05	[.02, .10]
Error	316.50	272	1.16
Norm violation
(Intercept)	195.06	1	195.06	126.48	.000
Group	12.56	1	12.56	8.14	.005	.03	[.01, .07]
Error	419.47	272	1.54

Note. LL and UL represent the lower-limit and upper-limit of the partial η² confidence interval, respectively.

There was a statistically significant difference between conditions in norm violation F(3,270) = 8.248, p < .001, η² = .084. The task-relevant condition (work-related, team goals; M = 0.89, SD = 1.45) was evaluated as significantly less of a negative violation compared to all three task-irrelevant conditions: nonwork-related team tasks (M = 1.91, SD = 1.11; p < .001; d = 0.79), nonwork-related personal tasks (M = .69, SD = 1.12; p < .001; d = 0.62), and work-related personal tasks (M = 1.50, SD = .17; p = 0.024; d = 0.47).

Similarly, we found differences between groups for agency F(3,270) = 15.738, p < .001, η² = .149. In this case, both work-related secondary task conditions were considered more agentic than nonwork-related tasks, regardless of personal or group orientations. Work-related team tasks (M = −0.45, SD = 1.67) differed significantly from nonwork-related team tasks (M = −1.44, SD = 1.19; p < .001; d = 0.68) and nonwork-related personal tasks (M = −1.37, SD = 1.10; p < .001; d = 0.65). Work related personal tasks (M = −0.23, SD = 1.20) differed significantly from nonwork-related team tasks (p < .001; d = 1.01) and nonwork-related personal tasks (p < .001; d = 0.99).

Finally, there was a statistically significant difference between groups in communal evaluations F(3,270) = 9.441, p < .001, η² = .095. These findings were similar to what was found with negative-valenced norm violations, as the task-relevant condition (M = −0.16, SD = 1.34) was evaluated as significantly more communal compared to the three task-irrelevant conditions: nonwork-related team tasks (M = −1.02, SD = 1.01; p < .001; d = 0.73), nonwork-related personal tasks (M = −1.02, SD = 0.84; p < .001; d = 0.77), and work-related personal tasks (M = −0.72, SD = 1.06; p = .015; d = 0.47).

Discussion

The results indicate that multitasking behavior that is done for any irrelevant purpose is seen as more of a violation compared to multitasking that is undertaken for relevant purposes (work-related and in pursuit of team goals). This finding confirms previous research and expectancy violation theory (Bell et al., 2005; De Bruin & Barber, 2019; Piercy & Underhill, 2020), along with our hypothesis. A similar pattern was also seen in regard to evaluations of communalism where relevant multitasking was seems as more communal compared to any irrelevant multitasking. However, social evaluations of agency produced slightly different results. Multitasking for a task relevant purpose is seen as more agentic only when compared to nonwork-related tasks. Agentic evaluations also show a clear distinction between work tasks and non-work tasks as expected, where work tasks are evaluated as more agentic compared to non-work tasks. Employees would be more likely to evaluate work-related multitasking as efficient and hardworking instead of unproductive.

Study 2

One limitation of our first study was that social evaluations of electronic multitasking behaviors were based on having concrete information about the nature of the secondary task. Yet when employees are multitasking in actual work settings, the nature of the secondary task may often be unknown or ambiguous to their coworkers. For instance, if someone is engrossed in work on their laptop, it can be unclear whether they are running updated calculations to inform a decision that must be made in the meeting (task relevant) or looking up reviews about a new restaurant that opened (task irrelevant). Ambiguous violations can be evaluated either negatively or positively in terms of their reward valence (Burgoon, 2015). Generally, when laptops are used in meetings, others cannot be sure what their coworkers are engaging in (Iqbal et al., 2011) or whether the behavior is necessary or not (Krishnan et al., 2014). Although multitasking individuals may have a perfectly legitimate reason, such reasons are not known to others observing that behavior. However, do workers tend to assume that their coworkers are multitasking on relevant tasks or irrelevant tasks when the reason is unknown? That is, we manipulated task relevance to make the potential reward valence clear, but in practice people have to make assumptions about task relevance. When this information is ambiguous, what do people usually assume about others?

There is evidence that employees can have either a negative interpretation bias (Amin et al., 1998) or a positive interpretation bias (Kleim et al., 2014) when evaluating ambiguous information, and in turn, these interpretation biases can lead to very different outcomes in attributions and behavioral reactions. Therefore, we extend these ideas to a meeting setting with technological multitasking to determine how people tend to evaluate electronic multitaskers when the secondary task purpose is unknown. Study 1 tested how employee evaluations change depending on when the reason for multitasking was known, whereas Study 2 expanded the generalizability of this study by exploring how those evaluations changed when the purpose for multitasking is ambiguous.

Methods

We recruited 206 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for a 2-minute survey being compensated at $.10 a survey. A total of 222 participants was required to detect a medium effect size of 0.21 (Richard et al., 2003) at 80% power. A final sample of 188 participants (52.1% male, 54.8% white/Caucasian) was retained after dropping participants with duplicate IP addresses, or who did not provide consent. The sample was generally older than a college undergraduate population, and what we would expect from an MTurk population (M = 33.3, SD = 10.27). 91% of the population were employed at least part-time, with 73% being employed full-time, which led us to believe that our results would be generalizable to a workplace context.

Participants were presented with one of three vignettes which described their coworkers multitasking for differing reasons using their laptop. One condition described multitasking that was relevant to the task at hand (sending emails to all creative team members to share their meeting notes), the other described irrelevant multitasking behaviors (sending emails to all creative team members to plan an upcoming happy hour), and an ambiguous condition (engrossed on work on their laptop). We chose the task-irrelevant situation that was nonwork-related but related to group (social) goals for two reasons. First, this kept the “team goal orientation” factor as a constant across task-relevant and task-irrelevant conditions so that the secondary task still involved the same individuals (coworkers on the same team). Second, these two conditions consistently showed mean differences in ratings of norm violation, agency, and communalism in Study 1.

Measures

Participants completed the same social evaluations measures and demographic used in Study 1. Internal consistency estimates of reliability for the three multi-items scales were all acceptable: norm violation (α = .92), agency (α = .88), and communalism (α = .76).

Results

All study descriptive statistics and correlations are shown in Table 4. Similar to Study 1, older workers were more likely to report that the behaviors described were more norm violating (r = −.21, p = .003) and less communal (r = −.16, p = .035). However, there was no relationship with gender and any of the variables of interest. All variables were explored for differences based on grouping condition; thus, we used an omnibus one-way ANOVAs to analyze the results. Condition means are shown in Table 5 and Figure 2, and a summary of the results are shown in Table 6.

Table 4.

Study 2 means, standard deviations, and correlations with confidence intervals.

Variable	M	SD	1	2	3	4
1. Norm violation	0.79	1.64
2. Agency	−0.28	1.62	−.78**
			[−.83, −.71]
3. Communalism	−0.23	1.33	−.78**	.75**
			[−.83, −.71]	[.68, .81]
4. Gender	1.48	0.50	.14	−.11	.02
			[−.00, .28]	[−.25, .03]	[−.13, .16]
5. Age	33.30	10.27	.21**	−.13	−.16*	.12
			[.07, .35]	[−.27, .02]	[−.29, −.01]	[−.02, .26]

Note. M and SD are used to represent mean and standard deviation, respectively. Values in square brackets indicate the 95% confidence interval for each correlation.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

Table 5.

Study 2 group means for each outcome of interest.

	Ambiguous condition ( N = 65)		Relevant condition ( N = 58)		Irrelevant condition ( N = 65)
	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD
Agency	0.08	1.52	0.05	1.48	−0.94	1.67
Communalism	−0.37	1.39	0.07	1.25	−0.38	1.31
Norm violation	0.70	1.60	0.50	1.46	1.16	1.79

Figure 2.

Differences across electronic multitasking conditions in Study 2.

Table 6.

Study 2 fixed-effects analysis of variance results for each outcome of interest.

Predictor	Sum of squares	df	Mean square	F	p	_Partial η²	_Partial η²90% CI[LL, UL]
Agency
(Intercept)	0.44	1	0.44	0.18	.670
Condition	42.13	2	21.07	8.65	.000	.09	[.03, .15]
Error	440.88	181	2.44
Communalism
(Intercept)	8.75	1	8.75	5.03	.026
Condition	7.71	2	3.85	2.22	.112	.02	[.00, .07]
Error	313.19	180	1.74
Norm Violation
(Intercept)	31.62	1	31.62	11.94	.001
Condition	14.01	2	7.00	2.65	.074	.03	[.00, .07]
Error	481.93	182	2.65

Note. LL and UL represent the lower-limit and upper-limit of the partial η² confidence interval, respectively.

There was a marginally significant difference between conditions in norm violation, F(2,182) = 2.646, p = .074, η² = .028. Specifically, task-relevant multitasking (M = 0.50, SD = 1.46) showed marginally less norm violation compared to task-irrelevant multitasking (M = 1.16, SD = .79, p = .082, d = 0.41). There were no differences between task-ambiguous multitasking (M = 0.70, SD = 1.60) and either task-relevant or task-irrelevant multitasking.

There was also a statistically significant difference between groups in agentic evaluations F(2,181) = 8.648, p < .001, η² = .087. Task-irrelevant multitasking (M = −0.94, SD = 1.67) was evaluated as significantly less agentic than task-relevant multitasking (M = 0.05, SD = 1.48, p = .002, d = 0.63) and task-ambiguous multitasking (M = 0.08, SD = 1.52, p < .001, d = 0.64). This finding indicates the ambiguous condition is perceived similarly to task-relevant condition in terms of agency. We found no significant differences between groups for communalism F(2,180) = 2.216, p = .112, η² = .024.

Discussion

The results for norm violation and agency confirm what was found in Study 1. Specifically, task-relevant multitasking was seen as less of a negative violation and more agentic than irrelevant multitasking. However, the results for communalism did not replicate, but was trending in the same direction where irrelevant multitasking was evaluated as less communal than relevant multitasking. We also found that regardless of multitasking condition, older workers evaluated the multitasking behavior as more norm violating and less communal overall than younger workers.

Of particular interest, this study compared a new task-ambiguous condition to task-relevant and task-irrelevant conditions. The results suggest that there were no significant differences between ambiguous electronic multitasking and either relevant or irrelevant multitasking in terms of communalism and norm violation. However, differences did emerge in terms of agency. That is, employees multitasking for an irrelevant purpose were evaluated as less agentic compared to when the reason for multitasking is unknown. The formal workplace meeting context may indicate that productivity norms are more salient when employees are evaluating behavior that is ambiguous. Thus, agency may be the evaluation that shows significant differences in perceptions when witnessing an ambiguous secondary task.

General discussion

With the recent increase of teamwork and the redesigning of the workplace to be a “network of teams” (Bersin, 2016), employees are in collaborative settings more than ever before (Krattenmaker, 2000). Thus, there are more opportunities for employees to evaluate their coworkers’ behaviors in group settings, which has led to concerns regarding counterproductive work behaviors (Allen et al., 2015; Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012). There are multiple factors that can influence how electronic multitasking is evaluated, such as time orientation, interdependence, task relevance, and time urgency (Bell et al., 2005). While postulated, they called for future researchers to empirically test these relationships to provide evidence for their model. Some introductory studies (De Bruin & Barber, 2019; Hemani & Rashidi, 2016; Marlow et al., 2016) have provided evidence for such factors, however these studies are the first that combine the electronic multitasking literature with the counterproductive meeting behavior literature to show the connections that exist, while also pointing out which judgments are not influenced. By experimentally manipulating aspects of the witnessed behaviors, we are able to piece apart which factors actually influence these judgments. The current set of studies explore electronic multitasking as a form of counterproductive meeting behavior. Specifically, we explored key characteristics of the secondary task that may alter how someone would view a hypothetical employee engaging in electronic multitasking behavior during a meeting. Below, we focus on each of these findings in terms of our key outcomes of norm violating, agency, and communalism. Study 1 focused on variations of task-irrelevant behaviors (team vs. personal goals and nonwork- vs. work-relatedness) whereas Study 2 aimed to replicate the key task-relevant versus task-irrelevant effects with an additional task-ambiguous condition (i.e., relevance is unknown).

Electronic multitasking effects on evaluations of negative norm violation

Our first key outcome in this study was related to negative norm violation— an evaluation of how much a behavior violates a social norm in a shared group setting (Stephens & Davis, 2009) with a negative reward valence. Study 1 confirmed our hypothesis that task-relevant multitasking would be evaluated as less of a negative norm violation than task-irrelevant conditions, confirming what we would expect from EVT where behaviors with a positive reward is evaluated better, and less rude, than behaviors with a negative reward. That is, sending emails during a work meeting was not considered as a violation when it was relevant to the work setting and team goals (sharing meeting notes). Alternatively, all of the task-irrelevant situations were rated as equally inconsiderate. These examples included emailing about work-related tasks that were not aligned with the shared team setting (work-related personal goals) and both nonwork-related task related to either personal or team goals (happy hour with friends or with team members). However, it’s worth noting that in an absolute sense, all of the mean scores trended toward the positive end of the scale (i.e., inconsiderate, rude, and unacceptable). This finding indicates that even task-relevant electronic multitasking is seen as somewhat rude or inconsiderate overall. That is, engaging in a secondary task during a formal work meeting violates societal norms for that context, and even situations that could be helpful for overall group goals are evaluated as having negatively valenced outcomes.

Study 2 also allowed us to explore the situations where the reason behind a coworker’s behavior is unknown. While Kleinman (2007) found that ambiguous electronic multitasking in a face-to-face meeting would be considered rude by coworkers, our data show no difference in terms of norm violation between the task-ambiguous conditions and other conditions (both task-relevant and task-irrelevant). Engaging in a secondary task was evaluated as a negative norm violation, but not knowing the reason for that secondary task does not mean that it is evaluated more negatively than multitasking that is relevant to the task at hand. With employees being in more meetings than ever before (Rogelberg et al., 2006), it is promising that engaging in work on their laptops is not automatically seen as more of a negative norm violation compared to when task relevant or irrelevant information is known. However, again, we found that task-relevant multitasking was consistently seen as less of a negative norm violation and rude when compared to task-irrelevant multitasking, confirming EVT where violations with a positive reward are evaluated better than violations with a negative reward.

Electronic multitasking effects on evaluations of agency

Our second key outcome in this study was related to agency—whether someone rates a hypothetical worker as productive and hardworking (Adler & Benbunan-Fich, 2012), or attributes with a positive reward valence. Both Study 1 and Study 2 confirmed our hypothesis that task-relevant multitasking would be evaluated as more agentic than task-irrelevant multitasking. This confirms what we would expect from EVT where violations with a positive outcome are evaluated better than violations with a negative outcome. That is, sending emails to coworkers during a work meeting was considered more agentic as long as it was relevant to the work setting (either sharing meeting notes or emailing about other work-related tasks). Alternatively, tasks that were not related to the work setting (either emailing coworkers or friends about a happy hour) was not seen as agentic and were more negatively valenced violations from the norm of being fully engaged in formal workplace meeting.

However, further differences emerged in Study 2 when adding the task-ambiguous condition (i.e., reason for multitasking was unknown). Of special note, agentic ratings for the task-ambiguous condition were similar to the task-relevant condition (i.e., slightly positive in the absolute sense; hardworking, productive, and efficient) and thus rated as more agentic than the task-irrelevant conditions (i.e., negative on the absolute scale; lazy, unproductive, and inefficient). That is, both task relevant and ambiguous multitasking were evaluated as having more positive outcomes associated with those behaviors. Such findings suggest that employees who witness others multitasking may assume the electronic multitasking is done for a task-relevant reason, which increases perceptions of productivity. Thus, employees may evaluate their coworkers to be working on a task at hand if they were engrossed in anything on their laptops. This could be a more recent development with the more prevalent use of laptops in meetings (Bajko, 2012) and the need to constantly multitask and be available (Manhart, 2004). The perceived benefits of laptop use can also be tied to what was found in school (Gulek & Demirtas (2005) and organizational settings (Johnson et al., 2019) where participants with their own laptops had better performance because of the flexibility that newer technologies afforded them. This flexibility acted as a positive reward associated with the violation. Further, the norms of technology use that was noted in the vignette (i.e., everyone uses technology to take notes) may have influenced participants to give their coworkers the benefit of the doubt if they did not see what secondary task they were engaged in. Supporting this, Kleinman (2009) found that in internal project meetings, such as the one described in this study, laptops are generally necessary for taking notes, looking up information, and staying in contact with others outside the meeting – all behaviors that are deemed positive and agentic in nature. With the growing adaptation of technology into most workplaces, this offers insights for management in terms of technology use in meetings. Employees may not automatically perceive electronic multitasking behavior as unproductive; rather, they only see it as a counterproductive meeting behavior if they know for certain it is for task-irrelevant purposes.

Electronic multitasking effects on evaluations of communalism

Our third and final key outcome in this study was related to communalism, which describes social evaluations related to being cooperative, generous, and trustworthy (Abele et al., 2008). Study 1 confirmed our hypothesis that task-relevant multitasking would be evaluated as more communal than task-irrelevant multitasking, though electronic multitasking conditions were rated generally as low in communalism in the absolute sense (with the task-relevant condition being closest to zero). Task-relevant emailing (sharing meeting notes with coworkers) was evaluated as more communal compared to all other types of task-irrelevant emailing, including personal work tasks (emailing other coworkers about different projects) and non-work tasks (setting up a happy hour with friends or coworkers). Similar to agency perceptions, engaging in task irrelevant multitasking does not carry potential positive rewards and thus is evaluated negatively, confirming what we would expect from EVT.

However, this particular result was not replicated in Study 2, as there was no difference between communalism evaluations for task-relevant, task-irrelevant, or even task-ambiguous multitasking. Although not significantly different, task-relevant multitasking was evaluated positively on the response scale (i.e., cooperative, generous, and trustworthy) indicating that relevant multitasking is more of a positive violation compared to irrelevant and ambiguous multitasking. Task-relevant multitasking was also rated as more communal than either task-relevant or task-ambiguous multitasking—both of the latter were evaluated negatively in an absolute sense (i.e., competitive, selfish, and untrustworthy).

Communion-like traits have been linked to social connection and acceptance, both which carry increasing importance in today’s teamwork related organizations. Given that differences in communalism were not replicated across studies and that most multitasking was generally evaluated as not communal in an absolute sense, employees may judge this type of behavior as not carrying the same positive rewards in terms of cooperativeness even if they can see the rewards associated in terms of efficiency.

Limitations and future directions

Although these studies offer an introductory glimpse at counterproductive meeting behaviors using technology, there are a few avenues that future research can pursue. For instance, the scenarios depicted showed a snippet of coworker behavior. However, in an organizational setting, employees tend to have more information about their coworkers and who they observe. According to EVT, normative judgments can be based on the context, relationship, or the communicator themselves (Burgoon, 1993). Thus, they may judge coworkers differentially based on past information they may have about that coworker, or even the frequency with which the perceiver also engages in electronic multitasking behaviors themselves. For instance, the stereotyping literature (Sagar & Schofield, 1980) suggests that information observers have about the object of their judgment can drive differential social perceptions (Duncan, 1976). Additionally, similar to the concept of in-group favoritism (Balliet et al., 2014), people may view multitasking much less negatively (and even positively) if they engage in such behaviors frequently themselves. In this case, electronic multitasking value and behavioral frequency might be considered social identity that creates in groups or outgroups based on who engages in that behavior or not. This is quite possible given people can develop social identities around something as simple as brand loyalty (He et al., 2012; Lam et al., 2010), including owning or using a certain technology device or not (Livingstone, 2011).

Future studies can address these questions by evaluating current employees in actual meetings, which would also assess the influence that both relationship and perceiver information have on normative judgments. Such designs would also help improve generalizability of study results to actual work situations, though with the tradeoff of less experimental control for causal inferences. For instance, a daily diary study can ask individuals to describe any meeting they may have attended in a day and the behaviors of their coworkers in addition to their own behavior. This will also help researchers understand what aspects of coworker behavior stands out in an employee’s memory and guide their behavioral reactions to those events. Kleinman (2009) followed a similar methodology with two participants and offered a glimpse at employee perceptions, where they shadowed employees at an organization and interviewed them after meetings to ask about coworker behaviors that stood out to them. This approach should be expanded further with a larger sample and asking about communicator characteristics and relationship norms.

Additionally, this study used vignettes that established the norm of technology use in meetings because of the growing integration of technology into most workplaces. This strategy was important to ensure observers of the hypothetical coworker behavior were not reacting to violations of technology use norms in general rather than the content of the tasks. For example, without noting that there was a general expectation of some technology use during the meeting, individual differences in attitudes towards technology and technology use (Czaja & Sharit, 1998; De Bruin & Barber, 2019; Morris & Venkatesh, 2000, 2005) could affect social judgments generally. However, future research could explicitly vary organizational norms to explore if these results are driven by the current norms set forth in the organization.

Given that norms tend to be driven based on frequent interactions within a specific group membership, technology norms could even differ within the same organization where employees are isolated in different departments or leadership teams. For instance, Stephens et al. (2011) found subordinates tend to adhere to their supervisor’s communication norm as a means of managing impressions. Further, research can also explore how evaluations of their coworker may change if everyone in the group were working on multiple tasks, including the participant themselves. Such group behavior can influence the meeting norms and thus, the acceptability of the witnessed behavior.

Another limitation of this study is that we do not have information on the behavioral consequences of these evaluations of electronic multitasking behavior. Although this study offers insights into the perceptual outcomes associated with witnessing electronic multitasking, future studies should explore the behavioral outcomes associated of evaluations that might be linked to secondary task relevance. Multitasking for any purpose could send the message that the user does not care about the primary task because of the reduction in attention provided, in turn leading to the observer engaging in their own acts of incivility (Cameron & Webster, 2011) toward that coworker, as well as other forms of counterproductive work behavior and lower job performance (Arasli et al., 2018; Cameron et al., 2018).

Finally, future research may want to explore how social evaluations in reaction to electronic multitasking might depend on individual differences or other characteristics. EVT theory notes that people have different “threat thresholds” that might inform their tolerance of specific violations (Burgoon, 2015). For instance, polychronicity and trait anger can influence the evaluations of multitasking behaviors, where employees who are lower in polychronicity or higher in trait anger might have a lower threshold for expectancy violations and evaluate even minor deviations as violations (De Bruin & Barber, 2019). Individuals higher in neuroticism, lower in conscientiousness (Erzen et al., 2019), and higher in openness (T’ng et al., 2018) tend to engage in more phubbing (phone snubbing) behaviors themselves leading to the question of how those traits would influence their own thresholds for violations from others.

In summary, our results show that although task relevance does drive social evaluations of electronic multitasking in work meetings, the nature of the secondary task (whether it is done for work/non-work or personal/team reasons) does change some perceptions of coworkers’ norm violation, agency, and communalism. Thus, employees who are engaging in such behaviors for work-related team goals might consider clearly communicating about their secondary task to alleviate some aspects of negative coworker perceptions. Given electronic multitasking is a pervasive phenomenon in the modern workplace, we also encourage future work that replicates and extends these experimental findings in more naturalistic organizational settings.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Rushika De Bruin

Larissa K. Barber

Author Biographies

Rushika De Bruin earned a PhD from Northern Illinois University and currently serves as a Senior Analyst at Carilion Clinic. Her research focuses on topics of workplace interactions, counterproductive work behaviors and perceptions of ICT use. issues.

Larissa K. Barber is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University. She conducts research in the fields of occupational health and industrial-organizational psychology with a focus on employee sleep and work-life balance.

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