Multitasking and Work-Life Balance: Explicating Multitasking When Working from Home

ABSTRACT

The present study explicates four types of multitasking when working from home according to their medium and social interactivity, and further explores the antecedent and consequences of different types of multitasking. A total of 429 U.S. employees who worked from home participated in an online survey in August 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results indicated that a balance between work and life identities was positively associated with technology-mediated and in-person high-interactive multitasking during work time, but not with low-interactive multitasking. In-person high-interactive multitasking, in turn, was related to greater interference with work but a higher level of life satisfaction. In addition, men and women experienced different levels of work-life identity balance and adopted different types of multitasking to achieve such a balance.

Notes

¹ This is an open-ended question asking participants to put two work activities that took the majority of their time when working from home. The most frequently mentioned work activities were writing e-mails, attending meetings, and preparing documents.

² Following reviewers’ suggestions, we ran EFA and CFA for the multitasking scales. The EFA results indicated a two-factor model of the multitasking scale: mediated versus in-person. We further tested two competing CFA models: the two-factor model based on the EFA results versus and four-factor model we proposed in this paper, and the four-factor model performs better than the two-factor model: RMSEA decreases from 0.096 (two-factor) to 0.062 (four-factor), CFI increases from 0.942 (two-factor) to 0.98 (four-factor), TLI increases from 0.923 (two-factor) to 0.968 (four-factor), and SRMR decreases from 0.047 (two-factor) to 0.030 (four-factor). Additionally, we conducted the likelihood ratio test to formally test the model fit (chi-square values) of the two-factor model and the four-factor model (Holbert & Grill, 2015). The results of the likelihood ratio test indicate that the four-factor model significantly improves the model fit. Thus the four-factor model of multitasking scales is preferred.

³ Following the reviewer’s suggestion, we ran two full SEM models but the models did not converge.

⁴ All path constraints were released except the correlations among the four multitasking variables, because we do not hypothesize these correlations to differ for men and women.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shan Xu

Shan Xu (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is an assistant professor in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include multitasking, well-being, and the dynamic reciprocity between media choices and media effects.

Kerk Kee

Kerk F. Kee (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an associate professor in the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. His interests include social media, diffusion of innovations, and organizational communication.

Chang Mao

Chang (Molly) Mao is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. Her research interests broadly include organizational communication, communication technology, and health communication.