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The Effects of Interruptions and Information Overload on Decision-Making Performance in Knowledge-Work

Laker, Lauren F.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447689712

Abstract Details

2015, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Business: Business Administration.
Research suggests that interruptions during a cognitive task can affect the quality and timeliness of decision-making in knowledge-intensive work environments. Moreover, information overload can lead to lower-quality and slower decision-making. This research introduces and tests “emphasis framing” as an operational tactic to help mitigate the effects of information overload and interruptions on the quality and timeliness of decision-making in knowledge-intensive work environments. A series of three experiments was conducted with the following participants: students, crowd sourcing participants, and emergency department physicians. In our studies with students and crowdsourcing participants, while our results were interesting, we were unable to attain statistically significant results. But the results of these experiments did illustrate that studying the complex cognitive tasks associated with knowledge work is nontrivial and highlighted the unique challenges introduced by the knowledge workers themselves and needs to be further explored. Additionally, the experiment with the crowdsourcing participants illustrated some of the challenges with conducting behavioral, knowledge-intensive experiments on crowdsourcing sites and highlighted that further research is needed to determine if that platform is appropriate for these types of experiments. We did attain statistically significant results on our experiment with emergency department physicians. We measured the effect of emphasis framing on two operational performance metrics when under information overload: (1) the quality (accuracy) of the physician’s clinical evaluation, and (2) the efficiency (timeliness) of his/her clinical decision-making. Our results showed that emphasis framing helped mitigate the effects of information overload and increased the quality of clinical decision-making. Contrary to what we expected, we found that decision-making took longer with the emphasis frame. While we had hypothesized that it would enable the participant to navigate the EHR more quickly, it appears that that perhaps there is actually a quality and timeliness tradeoff such that faster decision-making actually impedes the careful consideration given to high-quality decision making.
Craig Froehle, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Christopher Lindsell, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Jaime Newell, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
160 p.
Operations Research
decision-making; information overload; knowledge-work; healthcare; interruptions

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Laker, L. F. (2015). The Effects of Interruptions and Information Overload on Decision-Making Performance in Knowledge-Work [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447689712

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Laker, Lauren. The Effects of Interruptions and Information Overload on Decision-Making Performance in Knowledge-Work. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447689712.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Laker, Lauren. "The Effects of Interruptions and Information Overload on Decision-Making Performance in Knowledge-Work." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447689712

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1447689712
741
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.