The Spillunder Effect

Using an experiment, we study the interplay between cognitive intrusion and performance feedback within a multitask environment. Psychology studies document the negative effect of cognitive intrusion caused by the information about a future task on performance. We reason that cognitive intrusion interacts with the feedback system to influence employee outcomes. Providing frequent feedback can direct employee attention to the current task and hence we theorize that cognitive intrusion will reduce employee performance, but only when the feedback frequency is low. Consistent with our theory, we find that the performance of employees reduces in the presence of cognitive intrusion when the feedback frequency is low, but not when it is high. Additional analysis highlights that attention depletion fully mediates the effect of intrusion on task performance. Our study contributes to the performance management literature and sheds light on the interplay between design of control systems and employee attention in sequential task environments.