Abstract
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
Highlights
T “It is the working man who is the happy man
Study 1 revealed that the vast majority of workers across a broad array of job categories experience idle time at least occasionally, and allowed us to quantify the phenomenon with an estimate of $100+ billion paid annually to employees for time spent idle
It is likely that a large portion of this idle time is a pure loss due to organizational inefficiencies, a significant portion may be rationally planned and valuable to organizations as slack that can increase innovation and enable employees to better meet unexpected demands (Amabile et al, 2002; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993)
Summary
"The downside of downtime: The prevalence and work pacing consequences of idle time at work." Journal of Applied Psychology (forthcoming). Author Note: An earlier version of this work was presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Orlando, Florida. We thank Stephanie Fazio, Ista Zahn, Gabe Mansur, Joshua Margolis, Francesca Gino, Subra Tangirala, Adam Grant, Kavya Shankar, Ting Zhang, and the OB Lab at Harvard Business School for their assistance and advice throughout the development of this article
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