Department of Management, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin.
Entrepreneurship Unit, Harvard Business School.
J Appl Psychol. 2018 May;103(5):496-512. doi: 10.1037/apl0000294. Epub 2018 Jan 22.
Although both media commentary and academic research have focused much attention on the dilemma of employees being too busy, this paper presents evidence of the opposite phenomenon, in which employees do not have enough work to fill their time and are left with hours of meaningless idle time each week. We conducted six studies that examine the prevalence and work pacing consequences of involuntary idle time. In a nationally representative cross-occupational survey (Study 1), we found that idle time occurs frequently across all occupational categories; we estimate that employers in the United States pay roughly $100 billion in wages for time that employees spend idle. Studies 2a-3b experimentally demonstrate that there are also collateral consequences of idle time; when workers expect idle time following a task, their work pace declines and their task completion time increases. This decline reverses the well-documented deadline effect, producing a deadtime effect, whereby workers slow down as a task progresses. Our analyses of work pace patterns provide evidence for a time discounting mechanism: workers discount idle time when it is relatively distant, but act to avoid it increasingly as it becomes more proximate. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that the expectation of being able to engage in leisure activities during posttask free time (e.g., surfing the Internet) can mitigate the collateral work pace losses due to idle time. Through examination and discussion of the effects of idle time at work, we broaden theory on work pacing. (PsycINFO Database Record
虽然媒体评论和学术研究都非常关注员工过于忙碌的困境，但本文提出了相反的现象，即员工没有足够的工作来填满他们的时间，每周都会有几个小时的无意义的空闲时间。我们进行了六项研究，考察了非自愿空闲时间的普遍性和工作节奏的后果。在一项具有全国代表性的跨职业调查（研究 1）中，我们发现无意义的空闲时间在所有职业类别中都很常见；我们估计，美国雇主为员工的空闲时间支付的工资约为 1000 亿美元。研究 2a-3b 通过实验证明了空闲时间还会产生附带后果；当工人预计在完成任务后会有空闲时间时，他们的工作节奏会下降，任务完成时间会增加。这一下降扭转了有充分文件记录的截止日期效应，产生了死时间效应，即随着任务的进展，工人会放慢速度。我们对工作节奏模式的分析为时间折扣机制提供了证据：当空闲时间相对较远时，工人会对其进行折扣，但随着时间的临近，他们会越来越努力地避免空闲时间。最后，研究 4 表明，在任务后空闲时间内能够从事休闲活动的期望（例如，上网冲浪）可以减轻由于空闲时间而导致的附带工作节奏损失。通过对工作中空闲时间的影响进行检查和讨论，我们拓宽了工作节奏的理论。
