The Timing of Discrepant Interruptions and its Influence on Team Performance

Discrepant interruptions are inevitable in today’s highly dynamic and turbulent environment. Organizations need to handle discrepant interruptions effectively in order to survive. Since organizations mostly rely on teams to do task and achieve goals, teams are required to deal with the discrepant interruptions and modify their plans and strategies to address the interruptions. A team’s approach in handling discrepant interruptions has a significant effect on team effectiveness and accordingly affects the organization’s performance. In addition, team development literature suggests that project teams working on a creative task under a deadline engage in task transition during their allotted time (Gersick, 1988, 1989; Waller, Zellmer-Bruhn, & Giambatista, 2002). This dissertation focuses on the timing of the discrepant interruptions with regards to task transition. More specifically, I aim to explore how the relative timing of a discrepant interruption affects how a team works under a deadline. Building on the literature, I hypothesize that teams facing discrepant interruptions after their task transition would perceive the interruption as a hindrance to their performance, and thus have lower team coordination and performance. In contrast teams who face the discrepant interruptions before their task transition would perceive the interruption as a challenge, and thus have higher team coordination and performance. To test these hypothesis, I conduct an experiment in which teams of three work on a creative task for 40 minutes. Their goal is to create an audio commercial for an existing airline. All teams face the same discrepant interruption at 20 minutes into the task. I measure their appraisal of the discrepant interruption and team coordination using a questionnaire and code their video for the time lapse of their task transition. My analysis shows no support for any of the hypotheses except for the positive association between team coordination and team performance. As next step, I present some exploratory analysis on my data and identify a number of interesting findings. I find that teams working on a creative task under deadline go through their task transitions at different times within their allotted time. Teams that have their first task transition before a discrepant interruption have higher performance than others. Moreover, in this setting, teams have lower performance if they make their transition too early or too late. Observing team coordination, I find that team coordination positively affects team performance given the context I created. Finally, exploring team members’ pacing style, I find that, for teams delaying their task transition until after a discrepant interruption, having a deadline action style increases team performance.