Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks

By Sophie Leroy. 2009

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58a602c378da63993ab19b514e1bd57817bc18e5

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Information Systems and Management

Citations in the corpus

Why individuals in larger teams perform worse (2012, background): “Cognitive overload can diminish performance by decreasing the sheer amount of working memory capacity a person can devote to any one task (Klein & Boals, 2001; Leroy, 2009).”
Getting Explicit About the Implicit (2012, background): “Accessibility-based implicit measures are more commonly used as dependent measures than as predictors of behavior (Kunda & Spencer, 2003; Leroy, 2009).”
Mindfulness at Work: Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Awareness and Absent-mindedness (2013, background): “People routinely work long hours (Perlow 1998) and often switch between multiple tasks to get work done in organizations (Leroy 2009).”
Pardon the Interruption: An Integrative Review and Future Research Agenda for Research on Work Interruptions (2019, background): “The theory of attention residue also focuses on attentional division during an interruption and theorizes that people have a tendency to cognitively linger on the interrupted task even after stopping it and starting a new task (Leroy, 2009).”
Multiple goals: A review and derivation of general principles (2014, methodology): “Similarly, the concept of multiple goal pursuit has been used when considering both simultaneous (e.g., Schmidt & DeShon, 2007) and sequential (e.g., Leroy, 2009; Madjar & Shalley, 2008) goal pursuit.”
Motivating creativity: The effects of sequential and simultaneous learning and performance achievement goals on product novelty and usefulness (2015, background): “When asked to shift between achievement goals, individuals had to restrain processes and cognitions associated with the previous goal (Allpot, Styles, & Hsieh, 1994) and may have experienced attention residue, or the persistence of cognitive activity about the prior achievement goal while working on”
When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity (2020, unknown): “When employees choose to work on mindless tasks while procrastinating on a creative problem, does that free up cognitive resources (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006; see also Baird et al., 2012) and minimize the costs of attention residue (Leroy, 2009)?”
Multiple Team Membership: a Theoretical Model of its Effects on Productivity and Learning for Individuals and Teams (2011, background): “At the individual level, research on multitasking deals with the microprocesses and cognitive implications of an individual’s switching between two tasks or of “true” multitasking, where people work on two or more tasks simultaneously (e.g., driving a car while talking on a cell phone or using a Bla”
“My space”: A moderated mediation model of the effect of architectural and experienced privacy and workspace personalization on emotional exhaustion at work (2013, background): “This need to divide attention between work and non-work related issues is likely to tax people’s mental ability, resulting in increased emotional exhaustion over time (cf., Cohen, 1980; Leroy, 2009; McGrath, 1976; Wright & Cropanzano, 1998).”