Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-2008

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication and Information

Major Professor

Kenneth J. Levine

Abstract

At some time during a week a corporate worker is likely to attend an organizational meeting. The availability of multiple wireless technologies makes it possible for meeting attendees to be engaged in multitasking, i.e., performing multiple tasks simultaneously. During meetings the attendees often take the opportunity to continue working on their projects, read and write e-mail messages or surf the Web. This study evaluated the impacts of such multitasking behaviors on individual performances in the multicommunicating environment. The study used the experimental design. Respondents for this study were 154 undergraduate students in a large southeastern university. The participants accomplished two communication tasks simultaneously during the experiment: listening and writing. They were instructed to listen to a lecture presentation and at the same time write responses to an open-ended online survey questions, i.e., the participants of the study were multitasking.The researcher compared several factors (social presence, multitasking abilities, polychronicity, task prioritization, and receiver apprehension) for three different treatments (multi task vs. single task, live presenter vs. virtual presenter, one channel vs. two channels). In addition, a scale to measure multitasking abilities was developed and validated during the experiment. It was found that multitasking or completing two tasks simultaneously significantly decreases performances on both tasks. The performance on the listening task was decreased by 9.5%; the writing task performance was decreased by 11.2%. The researcher found no evidence that the degree of social presence could affect task prioritization and performance in the multicommunicating environment. However, multi-task performance was improved in the two-channel condition. Presenting the information in visual and oral forms significantly enhanced the information recall on the listening task.This finding suggests that the negative impact of multitasking can be reduced under certain conditions. The results of the study also indicate that individuals differ in their abilities to multitask. It was found that the level of receiver apprehension affects not only processing outcomes as message information is being received and perceived, but also processing outcomes as message information is being produced. It seems relatively clear that being less apprehensive about listening is an index of better performance in the multicommunicating environment.

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