Employees are increasingly engaging in electronic multitasking during workplace meetings, as the proliferation of technology is on the rise. Though electronic multitasking is common and potentially harmful to meeting effectiveness because it distracts individuals from achieving meeting goals, research in the organizational sciences is limited and largely atheoretical. Thus, the current study leverages the counterproductive work behavior framework to better understand why employees engage in electronic multitasking and also its relationship with individual/group meeting productivity. Data were collected from 406 working adults in a series of two surveys asking them about a recurring staff meeting they attend. Results suggest that there are both individual (i.e. conscientiousness) and meeting-oriented (i.e. meeting medium, norms for multitasking, and meeting size) predictors of electronic multitasking. Additionally, employee workload moderates several of these relationships; for example, highly committed employees/employees who perceive high levels of organizational justice were actually more likely to engage in electronic multitasking, which could suggest that they are electronically multitasking for worthy reasons (i.e. coping with their workload). However, the results also suggest a negative relationship between electronic multitasking and perceived individual/group meeting productivity, which points to the fact that this behavior is nuanced. Meeting leaders can use the results of the current study to learn how to carefully manage electronic multitasking during their meetings.
