The Influence of Task Interruption on Individual Decision Making: An Information Overload Perspective

摘要

Interruptions are a common aspect of the work environment of most organizations. Yet little is known about how interruptions and their charactcristics, such as frequency of occurrence, influence decision-making performance of individuals. Consequently, this paper reports the results of two experiments investigating the influence of interruptions on individual decision making. Interruptions were found to improve decision-making Performance on simple tasks and to lower performance on complex tasks. For complex tasks, the frequency of interruptions and the dissimilarity of content between the pri- mary and interruption tasks was found to exacerbate this effect. The implications of these results for futUre research and practice are discussed.