Procrastination At Work: Analysis And Management Strategies

Procrastination was recognized more than 3,000 years ago.Up to now,although academia has conducted a lot of research on procrastination from many perspectives such as psychology,sociology,and economics,research on its extension is still lacking: studies are focused on academic procrastination mainly,and are relatively insufficient on work procrastination.However,just like academic procrastination,work procrastination is a common occurrence in society,and is a kind of problem that can’t be ignored in human resource management of organizations.Therefore,this study of work procrastination can not only supply certain research blanks,but also be helpful to organizations’ management practice.Firstly,this paper comprehensively sorts out and summarizes the main aspects of employees’ work procrastination in the current situation of human resources management,including: the general performance of work procrastination,the common methods of concealing work procrastination,examples of causes and its corresponding solution ports of work procrastination,the consequences of work procrastination,the common methods of organizations to deal with work procrastination,and the effects of these methods.These generalizations or analysis can provide some ideas or guidance for the refinement of relevant theories in the future.Then,OLS and IV-2SLS methods are used to study a sample of nearly 300 employees without industry restrictions,and the causal link between seven other variables and the work procrastination variable is explored.Finally,it was concluded that: 1)the higher the level of work procrastination,the lower the task performance;2)the higher the moral climate of the team,the lower the level of one’s work procrastination;3)the higher the degree of physical and mental burnout,the higher the level of work procrastination;4)the stronger the self-control ability,the lower the level of work procrastination;5)the poorer the moral level of oneself,the higher the level of work procrastination;6)the higher the degree of supervision in an organization,the lower the level of work procrastination;7)the fairer the distribution to employees,the lower the level of work procrastination.Besides,the regression analyses above have obtained two by-products.One is proposed a method that may help identify more instrumental variables in management research.Two of the five instrumental variables identified using this method were validated effective,namely,the leader justice to other work related parties is taken as the instrumental variable of distributive justice,and the voluntary donation behavior is taken as the instrumental variable of moral level.However,since the distributive justice variable is not endogenous,its regression result with the instrumental variable was not used at last.Another by-product is the translation of the Distributive Justice Scale,the Personal Burnout Inventory,the revision of the Company Supervision Scale,and the addition of positive or negative questions to the Procrastination at Work Scale,the Task Performance Scale,and the Personal Burnout Inventory.These adaptations have achieved good reliability and validity in the questionnaire survey,enriching the operational definition of the variables to a certain degree.Finally,based on the previous analysis and the regression results,and combined with a framework of human resource management,the paper proposes recommendations on how organizations could prevent work procrastination of employees from happening.The recommendations are given from seven aspects:strategic planning,demand sorting,recruitment and employment,training and development,performance management,payment and treatment,and employee relations.