Many people feel the effects of the ending of Standard Time in early April long after they set their alarm clocks to spring forward an hour. Their body clocks, they announce through muffled yawns, are askew. What’s more, says Giuseppe “Joe” Labianca, an Emory University Goizueta Business School professor of organization and management, the one-hour shift associated with the transition to Daylight Savings Time annually is significantly related to an immediate eight percent increase in the number of traffic accidents.

This phenomenon led Labianca to explore the concept of time that humans have created and how, when altered, it can affect their perception and performance in the workplace. The results are detailed in his paper, co-authored by Goizueta organization and management professor Henry Moon, “When Is an Hour Not Sixty Minutes? Deadlines, Temporal Schemas, and Individual and Task Group Performance.” Publication is pending in the Academy of Management Journal.

 

For Labianca, this research, at least in theory, developed over time. “I designed this study ten years ago and then it came up again when I was reading about a couple of studies,” explains Labianca, who primarily does research on teams, social networks, and schemas. “I was reading about the effect of the switch to Daylight Savings Time on traffic accidents. The other study that caught my eye was about scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab who were working with Mars rovers. A Martian day is 37 minutes longer than an Earth day and this was producing a reaction similar to jet lag among scientists in the lab. We sometimes think about time as if it is objective, but the concept of time is a human creation and, thus, subject to all sorts of human biases. For example, when I was working in a seven day-a-week job as a consultant, I remember that when somebody gave me a project to do early in the morning on Friday, I wasn’t going to touch it until Monday morning because it was Friday. I was still organizing my time as if I were punching in to a normal Monday-to-Friday job.”

 

Applying this fascination with time to the concept of deadlines, a natural intersection of his past work on schemas and teams, Labianca, with Moon’s help, set out to better understand how an externally provided deadline is experienced differently based on whether it meshes with prototypical milestones for the culture, and the consequences for task performance. Their main contribution to existing research, they reason, is to deepen the understanding of cognitive underpinnings of the way time and deadlines are perceived by individuals and groups as they attempt to schedule activities in the Western culture’s clock time.

 

In a series of experiments, Labianca and Moon gave teams and individuals the same objective amount of time to complete a task, but they manipulated the starting times of tasks between prototypical (3:45 p.m., 4:00 p.m.) and atypical (3:52 p.m., 4:07 p.m.) clock times, and then examine the effect on their work pacing and performance. 

 

In the first experiment, twenty task groups were charged with creating and taping a television commercial in one hour. Ten of the twenty groups were begun at atypical times and the remaining ten were begun at prototypical times.  Five of the ten atypical groups were begun at 52 minutes past the hour, while the other five were begun at 7 minutes past the hour. Five of the prototypical groups were begun at 45 minutes past the hour, and the remaining of the five of the prototypical groups were begun on the hour. The groups were to assume the role of professional advertising writers, and they were charged with creating and then taping a sixty-second commercial for a website that sold student textbooks. The groups had exactly one hour to create and rehearse the commercials, and then sixty seconds to act out the commercials on a video that supposedly would be televised in primetime on national television. Advertising executives then judged the videos for quality to determine the group’s performance.

 

The second study shifted from the group level of analysis to the individual level of analysis. The 73 participants were told that they were taking part in a study related to creative productivity in work organizations, and that the experiment would consist of two related tasks that would take a total of 30 minutes to complete. Participants began the experiment either 8 minutes before or 8 minutes after the hour or half-hour point for the atypical condition. In the prototypical condition the participants began either directly on the hour or half-past the hour.  They were informed that they should spend an equal amount of time on each task and they were prompted to use a wall clock to stay on schedule. They were intentionally provided more scenarios for the first task than would be possible to complete in 15 minutes so that they would be forced to actively manage their time.

 

The outcomes of these experiments were quite telling of human time perception. Results of the group experiment indicated significant differences in groups’ time pacing and performance, with prototypical groups achieving higher performance. Individuals beginning at atypical times spent significantly longer on the first set of tasks, thus leaving them with less time for the second set of tasks, increasing perceived time pressure, and resulting in poorer performance on the second set of tasks. “If somebody tells you his flight comes in at 3:57 p.m., you will most likely store it in your mind as getting in around 4:00 p.m.,” explains Labianca, who was prompted to pursue this research by a student, Ian Watt, in search of a PhD project. Watt contributed to the research. “The same kind of thing is going on in our study. You’re telling the team that you’ve got sixty minutes to complete this project. If you tell them they need to be done at 3:52 p.m., they may not hear it as well, they may not store it in memory as well, or if they retrieve it they’re likely to make more mistakes because it doesn't fit in with the way they usually tell time.”

 

The ultimate goal of this type of research, suggests Labianca, is to provide team leaders with a better understanding of how starting times and ending times might influence both individual and group processes and outputs. Managers, adds Labianca, need to recognize that we are all synchronized with these temporal milestones, and must therefore consider the clock in project planning. “As mentioned, I saw this in my own work behavior. If somebody said, ‘Do this project and you’ve got a week,’ and I got it at an atypical time, I didn’t get to work immediately,” says Labianca. “That’s what you kept seeing with the folks in our experiments. They were lost in time. If management is going to give people something at an atypical time, they should provide them with some kind of visual temporal map, like a PERT diagram, to plan out how much time to spend on various phases. I would venture to guess that even with such a map that there might still be some kind of phenomena happening that would lead the employees to pace themselves poorly.”

 

According to Labianca, the next step in this research is to inform people that this type of time phenomenon exists, and then see if the struggles with time management and missed deadlines go away.

 

Only time will tell.