Research INSIGHT
Why time at work is so SLOW today?
“FAST OR SLOW: HOW TEMPORAL WORK DESIGN SHAPES EXPERIENCED PASSAGE OF TIME AND JOB PERFORMANCE”, Academy of Management Journal 2022, Vol. 65, No. 6, 2014–2033 (https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2019.1110)
We all experienced the distress of looking at the clock only to realise that just 10 minutes have passed since we’ve last checked what felt like an hour ago. Indeed, the way we experience the passage of time at work (especially on Monday morning and Friday afternoon…) is a fundamental aspect of work experience. And if time flies when you are having fun, it becomes an ordeal when each second feels like a minute. What can employers possibly do to make our subjective experience of time better? A recent paper by Dr. Rocky Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems, and his research team explores how time-related work design characteristics can actually make a day feels shorter and, if yes, is it worthwhile doing so?
When we “watch a pot until it boils,” time seems to pass slowly because we give our full attention to the passage of time. On the other hand, when we are immersed in non-temporal aspects of our environment, time seems to pass quickly because our focus is elsewhere. By shifting our attention away from time, both temporal predictability – such as minimising the unpredictable waiting period before a staff meeting scheduled for “sometimes” today for example – and task segmentation – when work is divided into small blocks of different tasks that are precisely scheduled –can speed up how we experience time at work. Using data collected across a series of experiments ranging from asking hundreds of participants recruited on Amazon’s Mturk to record their work satisfaction upon completing certain tasks to surveying how workers
in a 2,000-people Chinese garment factory react to time-related changes, the research confirms that not only temporal predictability and task segmentation contribute to how workers perceive the passage of time, but that this perception actually translates into better job performance and satisfaction.
The practical implications of these findings are obvious since they establish that employers have the ability to arrange – and design – working hours in ways that keep employees focused, happier and more productive.
Thus, making sure that employees are busy instead of having the time to fret while waiting between tasks can increase job satisfaction. Meanwhile, ensuring that meetings – the scourge of so many office workers – start and finish precisely on time can also go a long way in reducing time-induced anxiety. Breaks can also be an effective tool for making the passage of time seems faster, provided they are used to engage in non-routine activities. While it’s easier to enhance the feeling of time passing in industries that are creative, highly-skilled or amenable to workers’ autonomy, even strenuous and repetitive jobs can be improved using these insights (playing the right music on the factory floor maybe?).
In any event, next time you catch yourself looking at the clock while waiting for a meeting that “just about to start”, it may be a good use of your time to share this study with your boss!
Dr. Peng Rocky CHEN Associate Professor Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems
The HKBU School of Business hosted the HKBU Business Power Lunch for business leaders on 30 March 2023. The event gathered senior executives and entrepreneurs from banks, renowned start-ups and corporations.
Prof. Ed Snape, Dean of the School of Business, welcomed guests. “Our faculty are producing world-class research and generating business and social impact. The aim of the Business Power Lunch is to help us to connect with the business sector and generate new insights for both practice and research.”
Themed “Human-Technology Interaction – Next Frontier ?”, the presentation by Prof. Kimmy Chan of the Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems, highlighted the findings from her ongoing research on the implications of service robots for customer service. Her findings suggest that a perceived lack of creativity was the major concern people have about service robots, but that pairing robots with a creative employee and at the same time using robots with human-like (“anthropomorphised”) characteristics would help resolve that concern.
Prof. Chan explained further that according to field studies and laboratory experiments, trait transference effects apply to any human-robot team when the robot is anthropomorphised, since people tend to use information about known group members to make inferences about unknown members. In other words, when a human-like service robot is paired up with an employee who is known for being creative, customers infer that the robot is also creative. The results of the field experiment with an online store showed that a product which is jointly designed by a human-robot team received more ‘likes’ (86%) than in the case of a similar team with a non-anthropomorphism robot (70%). Furthermore, customers served by the anthropomorphised robot-team spent more (US$12.99) in the store per month than with a non-anthropomorphised robot-team (US$7.33).
Prof. Kimmy Department of Management, Marketing and Information SystemsThe HKBU Business Power Lunch provides an opportunity for HKBU School of Business scholars to share their latest research insights with senior leaders and business executives. Other research insights from the School of Business are available here.
The HKBU School of Business has been ranked 12th in Asia Pacific and 58th in the world, in the latest Association of Information System (AIS) Research Rankings, based on data accumulated from 2020 to 2022. The School’s world and Asia Pacific rankings are tied with Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Prof. Christy Cheung, Professor in the Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems and a renowned scholar in the IS field, is ranked 1st in Hong Kong and 29th among the 254 IS researchers globally. Recently, Prof. Cheung has also been listed on the Research.com ranking as 13th in the Best Business and Management Scientists in China, a ranking of 7,819 scholars from Business and Management.
The AIS Research Rankings service is a globally reputable indicator tracking publications in eight leading information systems (IS) journals in the AIS Senior Scholars’ basket of journals, a defined basket of high quality journals in the field of business information systems and digitisation. The journals included in the “AIS basket of 8” are Management Information Systems Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Journal of Information Technology.
Department of Accountancy, Economics and Finance
Department of Management, Marketing & Information Systems
Presidential economic approval rating and the cross-section of stock returns
Journal of Financial Economics
Cheating constraint decisions and discrimination against workers with lower financial standing
Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2022.10.004
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2022.104211
Dr. Jia Hui LIM Dr. Liyao WANGDate Speaker
14 – 18 June 2023
Hong Kong Baptist University
Jointly organised with IACMR
28 June 2023
9:00-10:30
Zoom
Management
Topic
The 10th Biennial International Association for Chinese Management Research Conference
Centre for Business Analytics and the Digital Economy
Joint with Kyoto, NTU, Osaka, and Sinica
7 June 2023
9:00-10:30
Zoom
Joint with Kyoto, NTU, Osaka, and Sinica
19 May 2023
9:00-10:30
Zoom
Joint with NTU, NYU-Shanghai, Sinica, and SMU
10 May 2023
9:00-10:30
Zoom
Joint with CEIBS, NTU, and NUS
Prof. Adam BRANDENBURGER
New York University
Prof Mark WHITMEYER
Arizona State University
Dr. Scott DAVIS
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Prof. Yuhau WANG
Harvard Univesity
Agreement and Disagreement in a Non-Classical World
Bayes = Blackwell, Almost
A Theory of the Global Financial Cycle
The Rise and Fall of Imperial China
The Research Espresso, a bimonthly e-publication covering everything you need to know about the latest research developments at the HKBU School of Business, focuses on four key areas: Research Insights (the main research topic of the month), Research Excellence (recognition of faculty members’ research achievements), News (research-related updates), and Seminars (sharing research skills and knowledge).
The idea is to provide business practitioners with the most recent research findings from the School‘s faculty. We want to build links between research and practice and to ensure that the School's research has business and societal impact.
Enjoy reading, and your feedback and input is always welcome!
