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<div>Interruptions are the phenomena that exist and appear in many places in life; they appear everywhere in every kind of activities either in doing personal activities on a daily basis or in doing complicated activities and processes in complex systems in industries.</div><div><br></div><div>The role and the effect of interruptions have begun to appear a lot significantly in the industries in the last few years especially the ones that related to the task or job interruptions in businesses that affect directly to the flow process of the work. It is important to reference that the interruptions can be found in many different formats depending on the work environments. Interruptions are considered as a request for a change in process, job, think, direction, move or just for a short period of pause; these interruptions have the potential to carry treasured information that can allow people to control and manage activities in the incredibly dynamic environment successfully. This control obligation is universal in many different work environments ranging from office work to a more complicated and complex world of industries and businesses. Thus, interruptions have the potential for a tremendous positive impact on work success or the potential for a significant negative impact on work success. Industries hypothesize this interruption as a useful source of valuable information to improve the workplace and flow process. Increasing the frequency of interruptions can lead to increasing the magnitude of information obtainable from a highly dynamic activities environments.</div><div><br></div><div>Consequently, that leads to improving the coordination between people for the entire organization. However, this possible enhancement and improvement in performance and workflow process of work, utilizing the insight information from interruptions, has shown to be extremely problematic and challenging. The efficacy of the information attained from interruptions is relevant to the ongoing revolution of the workflow process. </div><div><br></div><div>In this dissertation, we divide the research study into two different phases. In the initial phase, we study the workflow process interruptions from the standpoint of human subject experimentation to understand, explore, comprehend, and exploit interruptions phenomena while doing a particular task. This phase leads us to comprehend and learn whether or not the workflow process interruptions affect on task performance, transitional lag time, interruption lag time, and resumption lag time regarding the range and the level of interruptions. We conduct experiments in two stages, and we use factorial designs in these experiments. In the second stage of this phase, we use the obtained information from the first stage to design the experiment for this stage. Subsequently, the experiment is complete and proposes new policy regulations for the workflow processes under the occurrence of the nested interruptions circumstances.</div><div><br></div><div>In the second phase of the dissertation, we study the workflow process interruptions from the standpoint of a simulation model. The apparent primary goal of this phase is to understand and comprehend the effect of the workflow process interruptions in the context of various policies. In this study, we compare, test, and evaluate the new proposed policy compared to the current practice of handling interruptions when nested interruptions exist and occur. As a result, the proposed policy improved the workflow process by a substantial and noticeable amount of time-saving in total completion time for the workflow process.</div>

Deciding what information we attend to has implications on our ability to remain valuable and productive in our respective academic and economic domains. This study investigated if attentional switching due to information technology interruptions would deplete resources in a unique way and impair performance on a response inhibition task. Three groups were compared on the Simon task after participants either did or did not receive interruptions during a self-regulation task. Unexpectedly, a larger Simon effect was found for participants who did not receive interruptions. These results conform to previous evidence showing sustained directed attention may result in depletion and effect subsequent inhibitory control. Although not supporting predictions, these results may provide a basis for further research, particularly because younger generations are developing in a more connected world than preceding generations. By understanding these differences, younger generations may better adapt to technological advances and leverage them to their advantage. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

abstract: Workplace intrusions—unexpected encounters initiated by another person that disrupt an individual’s work—are generally characterized as negative experiences that deplete resources, increase role and information overload, and promote strain. My research challenges this consensus by arguing that intrusions may also provide benefits to the employees who are intruded upon. Specifically, I investigate how intrusions impact the extent to which employees engage in their own work—engagement—and the extent to which they engage with others at work—collaboration. I also investigate the indirect effects of different types of intrusions on employees’ task-focused and person-focused citizenship through these mechanisms. I tested my predictions utilizing experience sampling methodology (Study 1), a within-person experimental critical incident study (Study 2), and an experiment (Study 3). My research investigates the dynamics of various types of workplace intrusions, with results suggesting that intrusions may lead to beneficial employee outcomes in addition to the adverse outcomes previously demonstrated in the literature. Given the ubiquitous nature of intrusions in organizations, these findings have both theoretical and practical significance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2020

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The modern workplace environment is filled with interruptions due to the necessity of coworkers to communicate with each other. Studies have revealed that interruptions can disrupt the ability of a knowledge worker to concentrate on a task, which can impact task performance (TP). Communication interruptions are due, in part, to the unavoidable side-effect of using technology to facilitate these interactions. Human-computer-interaction (HCI) involving instant messaging (IM) communication tools can cause interruptions to occur as coworkers use this technology to communicate on various work related activities. The main goal of this research was to empirically investigate the role of instant messaging interruptions (IMI) on knowledge workers' TP in the workplace. This research used a field experiment to investigate the role of IMI on knowledge worker TP during e-learning-based training. With the pervasive use of computers in the workplace, e-learning training has become an efficient and effective way to deliver training to knowledge workers. The experiment utilized a posttest-only control group design using two experimental groups and one control group. Each group consisted of four e-learning training tasks of varying task complexity (TC). These included simple and complex tasks involving symbolic and spatial manipulation. While working on the e-learning training tasks, the participants in the experimental groups were interrupted by randomly generated IMI. One experimental group experienced a low number of IMI (LIMI) and one experienced a high number of IMI (HIMI). The control group experienced no IMI (NIMI). The volunteer participants were selected at-random from the online administrative department of a local technical college. A total of 60 experiments were conducted and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) of the 120 usable records revealed that the time to complete a task (TPtct), for simple and complex, as well as symbolic and spatial tasks were affected by increased IMI. Results for changes to task accuracy (TPacc) were not statistically significant. Implications of this study for research were the identification of gaps in previous research concerning environment of the experiments and the type of interrupting medium that was used. Previous research has been primarily conducted in a laboratory environment with interruptions generated by means other than IM. This research used IM as the interrupting medium with participants working in their normal workplace environment. Implications for practitioners were the additional time required to complete a task when interrupted by IMI and the way in which workers seem to compensate for the distraction.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Farrell J. Webb / The current military family life is punctuated by a series of events that are not present in the lives of most Americans, most notably the stress, fear, and disruption of lives that accompany the periodic absences of one or both adults in the family. These absences fostered by deployments, challenges of readjustments, coupled with combat injuries have tremendous effects on not only the troops and their families, but also the communities that military families live in as well. This investigation examined how military assistance, family connectedness and community networks contribute to the well-being of families affected by anticipated and repeated deployments that cause family interruptions. Despite the myriad of studies on military deployments and the impact on families, there has been little focus on the spouse and children that relates to their resilience during the deployment process. Using an online national all service unit sample from military spouses (n = 185) who have children and have experienced a recent deployment (n = 153) it was possible to isolated the specific components that influenced the well-being of those affected by deployments. The Influence of Interruptions on Family Well-Being Model—which combines ideas from both the ecological systems and boundary ambiguity perspectives—was tested and utilized in this study. It was disclosed that 45% of the variance in well-being could be explained by knowing how families perceive the deployment process, military assistance, community networks, family connectedness, and how these families coped with periodic family interruptions. These data revealed that deployments have a greater impact than originally conceived and that issues addressing deployments must be placed on the national agenda, particularly where family well-being is concerned. The research findings underscore the importance of family to both the deployed personnel and the ones that they leave home. The implications from this investigation are simple and direct—there needs to be a more comprehensive program for children that employ pre-, during- and post-deployment related issues, such as adjustments to absent parents, developing better responses to the authority structure of the remaining parent, and some program focused on the immediate and long-term psychological needs of the children and their families.

The purpose of this study is to determine how nonroutine acts performed by iii trained emergency workers developed into routine emergency acts and skills. I will be specifically looking for concepts that are common throughout the different types of emergency workers that will be interviewed. The data is gathered from focus groups that were recruited from classes on campus. In particular the results depict some very common techniques used in training that allowed the workers to feel confident about their role in emergencies. These tended to include repetition of "classroom training, "but more importantly from the viewpoint of the workers, repetition of simulated emergencies. The development of autonomy in decision making was an important facet for workers whose work "territory" was varied; however, autonomy was rarely stressed for those in relatively constant surroundings such as pools. Several commonalities were found throughout each field. These included interruptions, self-efficacy, the use of judgment and tacit knowledge. Many of the participants also expressed the same sentiment towards their feelings of the training and its efficiency. Some research will also show attempts to change policy and training within emergency workers in order to improve job performance and enhance the safety of the public as well. I will include a small statistical appendix that looks at the satisfaction level of evacuees who fled to Houston, Texas when Hurricane Katrina hit. Five specific factors were examined and regressed to determine satisfaction levels. Only two factors showed any type of significance. As the discussion will indicate, certain previous factors, before the hurricane hit, are believed to be the cause of these particular results.