What's keeping bosses from being good leaders? A glut of e-mails

WASHINGTON: Keeping up with emails may be preventing bosses from achieving their goals and being good leaders, a study has found.

The research, and published in Journal of Applied Psychology, is one of the first to examine how distractions from email impact managers, their productivity and their role as leaders.

According to the researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) in the US, employees spend more than 90 minutes every day - or seven-and-a-half hours every week - recovering from email interruptions.


"Like most tools, email is useful but it can become disruptive and even damaging if used excessively or inappropriately," said Russell Johnson from MSU.

"When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions, they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don't have the leadership behaviour they need to thrive," said Johnson.

What further makes managers different from other employees is that when feeling overwhelmed and unproductive because of email demands, they recover by limiting leader behaviours and pivoting to tactical duties.

This action is strategic and intentional so that they feel more productive, Johnson said.

"We found that managers scaled back 'leader behaviours' more so than initiating 'structure behaviours'," Johnson said.

"The former behaviours relate to motivating and inspiring subordinates, talking optimistically about the future or explaining why work tasks are important; the latter are more concrete and task-focused, such as setting work goals, assigning duties or providing feedback," he said.

Not only are managers not managing -- but they are also focusing on smaller tasks for the sake of feeling productive.

To test how email demands hinder managers, researchers collected surveys from a group twice a day for two weeks.

Managers reported their frequency and demands of emails, their perceived progress on core job duties, how often they engaged in effective transformational leader behaviours and initiating structure leader behaviours.

"We found that on days when managers reported high email demands, they report lower perceived work progress as a result, and in turn engage in fewer effective leader behaviours," Johnson said.

Beyond failing to complete their own responsibilities, email distractions cause subordinates to suffer from a lack of leader behaviours, or those that motivate and inspire.


"When managers reduce their leader behaviour and structure behaviours, it has been shown that employees' task performance, work satisfaction, organizational commitment, intrinsic motivation and engagement all decrease, and employees' stress and negative emotions increase," Johnson said.

Leader behaviour has a strong correlation to employee performance which, unfortunately, were the behaviours that got put on the back burner because of email distractions.

"The moral of the story is that managers need to set aside specific times to check email. This puts the manager in control - rather than reacting whenever a new message appears in the inbox, which wrestles control away from the manager," Johnson said.