Perception and Management of Work Interruptions: A Qualitative Study

The adoption and use of digital technologies in today's organizations, management, and business enables many benefits, including extensive information access, quick communication, and greater productivity. However, the proliferation of digital technologies also poses challenges for the digital business era. One major dark side of digital technology use are IT-mediated interruptions, which are nowadays ubiquitous in an organizational context due to digital collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or Slack and also due to inadequate user behavior such as permanent checking of emails. Based on the insights of a former exploratory study on work interruptions (Stangl & Riedl, 2023b), we plan to conduct a qualitative study based on which digital business professionals describe their general perception and management of interruptions.