One way to decrease job dissatisfaction that is caused by employee boredom is to

6 Consequences of Boredom at Work

Boredom at work has negative consequences for workers, their organizations, and society as a whole. Research suggests that the predicted or demonstrated effects of boredom for individual employees include work stress, job dissatisfaction, physical and mental health problems, workplace hostility, increased risk taking or thrill seeking, horseplay and sabotage, alcohol and drug problems, absenteeism, work-related injuries among adolescent employees, and poor performance. There is also evidence that boredom leads to the perception that time passes more slowly, although individuals’ objective estimates of time passed seemed to be unaffected by high levels of boredom. The consequences of boredom for businesses and organizations include higher employment costs (due to employee turnover, absences, and health care costs), performance problems (work quality and work quantity), and reduced organizational effectiveness (including profitability). Finally, boredom at work may also have consequences for society as a whole, including lost productivity, reduced quality of work life, and reduced consumer safety. Numerous studies of vigilance—the ability to maintain attention and respond to stimuli over an extended period of time—reveal that an observer’s ability to detect critical signals declines over time. This may be exhibited by a reduction in accuracy or increased response time. High levels of boredom experienced in vigilance tasks have been associated with stress and potentially more serious outcomes. Especially disconcerting is the case of a commercial airliner that overflew its destination by more than 100 miles before the sleeping flight crew was awakened by air traffic controllers. Clearly, boredom at work has significant consequences.

Consequences of Boredom at Work

Boredom at work has negative consequences for workers, their organizations, and society as a whole. Research suggests that the predicted or demonstrated effects of boredom for individual employees include work stress, job dissatisfaction, physical and mental health problems, workplace hostility, increased risk taking, horseplay and sabotage, alcohol and drug problems, absenteeism, work-related injuries among adolescent employees, and poor performance. Furthermore, the relationship between boredom and many of these outcomes is strongest among employees who are highly boredom prone. There is also evidence that boredom leads to the perception that time passes more slowly, although individuals' objective estimates of time passed seemed to be unaffected by high levels of boredom. The consequences of boredom for businesses and organizations include higher employment costs (due to employee turnover, absences, and health care costs), performance problems (work quality, work quantity, and counterproductive work behavior) and reduced organizational effectiveness (including profitability). Finally, boredom at work may also have consequences for society as a whole, including lost productivity, reduced quality of life, and reduced consumer safety. Numerous studies of vigilance—the ability to maintain attention and respond to stimuli over an extended period of time—reveal that an observer's ability to detect critical signals declines over time. This may be exhibited by a reduction in accuracy or increased response time. High levels of boredom experience in vigilance tasks have been associated with stress and potentially more serious outcomes. Especially disconcerting is the case of a commercial airliner that overflew its destination by more than 100 miles before the sleeping crew was awakened by air traffic controllers. Clearly, boredom at work has significant consequences.

Despite the preponderance of negative outcomes associated with boredom, recent laboratory research Van Tilburg and Igou suggests that it is possible that boredom can in some cases lead to positive outcomes. Since a key component of boredom is a perceived lack of meaning in one's work, it is possible that bored employees could cope by engaging in higher levels of OCB or by developing more creative ways to do their jobs. More organizational research on this possibility is needed, however.

Boredom

Boredom is a problem of information “underload,” insufficient work challenge, and understimulation.147 Boredom typically results from the need to maintain attention in the absence of relevant task information and may be most likely to occur in semiautomatic tasks that prevent the mind from wandering but are not fully mentally absorbing. Substantial differences exist among individuals as to what types of activities they find boring.148 Nevertheless, boredom appears to be a major problem in many complex real-life tasks. For example, boredom may be a contributing factor to human error in driving a locomotive149 and in piloting a prolonged routine flight in high-performance and commercial aircraft.150

The maintenance phase of most routine anesthetics is a period of very low workload and infrequent task demands.39 This low workload may result in a low arousal state, which can lead to impaired performance. In laboratory experiments, increased effort in the presence of boredom is necessary to suppress distracting stimuli and a generalized feeling of fatigue.148 The addition of other performance-shaping factors, such as pre-existing fatigue and sleep deprivation, may augment the negative impact of boredom.23 Boredom may be minimized by altering the sequence of tasks151 or by adding tasks to a monotonous job.152 Dividing attention among several tasks (time sharing) will in some circumstances improve monitoring performance.153,154 Psychological studies suggest that some individuals may be more “boredom prone” but that behavioral interventions can improve these individuals’ vigilance.155

Observation of experienced anesthesia providers has revealed that, during times of low workload, many add additional tasks to their routine. These secondary tasks include clinically relevant functions, such as rechecking the composition or organization of the anesthesia workspace. Alternatively, it is common to observe anesthesiologists reading, listening to music, attending to personal hygiene, or conversing with their colleagues intraoperatively about matters unrelated to patient care. The choice of secondary tasks is probably less important than how those tasks are integrated with the primary tasks of caring for the patient and how easily and quickly the secondary tasks are set aside when anesthesia workload increases.23,156 From a broad perspective, if the anesthesia task environment is optimized to minimize boredom and yet not be as continuously busy as to be stressful, the highest consistent levels of vigilance and performance will be attained.

Abstract

Boredom as a state and understimulation as a stressor are examined in the context of working, with consideration also given to the potential role played by these factors in evolutionary terms. It is suggested that the waste of mental capital engendered by understimulation inside and outside of work can have wider negative consequences—a high proportion of employees already report experiences of boredom. Links are drawn between work design and optimal levels of variety and arousal, both of which have implications for psychological functioning and mental health. These relations are located within discussion of the influential roles of attention, personality characteristics—including sensation-seeking—and brain-related factors, highlighting the interplay between internal and external variables which lead to the experience of boredom. Reference is made to a range of individual coping strategies—some deliberate and some instinctive—as well as much-needed social approaches to these widespread phenomena.

14. Boredom

Boredom is a feeling associated with a lack of novel input, perhaps with a lack of input in total. Its occurrence in various animals has been discussed by Wemelsfelder (1993). She refers to animals in impoverished conditions increasingly directing their behavior toward inadequate stimuli, exaggerating normal behavior, and establishing stereotypies. A threshold in the increasing series, which she defines as boredom, is “that state of behavioral fixation in which the animal's orientation towards a novel stimulus loses its inquisitive and manipulative character.”

The feeling of boredom may arise because of severe sensory deprivation or because those potentially interesting stimuli that are detectable are repeated exactly. In the first case, the individual might be in a plain, empty cage; in the second case, there might be a machine present that continually undergoes the same movements with the same periodicity. In either case a sequence of behavior whose function is to carry out useful exploration is continued until lack of useful consequences tend to result in its inhibition. At the same time, or even in the absence of the attempts at exploration, a feeling of boredom arises and increases, sometimes associated with the abnormalities of behavior described here.

It may be that brain function can be impaired when there is too little input, or too little new input, for a prolonged period. Studies of sensory deprivation suggest that this is so. It may be that the existence of the feeling of boredom, with its concomitant behavior abnormalities, provides sufficient neural activity to maintain the brain in a low input situation. Boredom that continues to the point where inadequate input results in greater and greater risk of neural system damage may have stronger and stronger effects on the individual, which, although more and more unpleasant, are more likely to prevent the damage.

Destruction of property

Because of boredom, unethical security officers will often decide to use a computer, take a “spin” on a forklift, take a drive in a company vehicle, or simply perform some “knucklehead action” that damages or destroys property. Organizations with effective inventory control procedures will normally discover a loss or theft within a short period of time. Many security companies have checks and balances to ensure that a security officer cannot misrepresent his or her time, thereby cheating the employer or client.

Occasionally, low-paid contract security officers decide to quit their employer and simply walk off their post. These individuals show a great lack of respect and courtesy. If a security officer chooses to quit a job, providing their employer with proper notice is essential. A complete lack of honesty and integrity occurs when 1-900 phone numbers are called by security officers. This type of conduct seriously detracts from the image of every person who works in the security department or from the security contractor.

Sensation Seeking

Individuals who are underaroused, prone to boredom, hypomanic, or depressed may value the stimulation and excitement associated with waging higher amounts of money and participating in higher-risk gambling activities; this has often been proposed as an important individual difference between problem gamblers. Sensation seeking has been among the most commonly investigated personality factors among problem gamblers but the results have been unequivocal. Correlation between higher needs for arousal and stimulation and preference for riskier bets has been observed in undergraduate gambling. In a sample of community-recruited problem gamblers, some aspects of sensation seeking (i.e. the boredom susceptibility) were found to correlate significantly with severity of gambling but negatively correlated in a study of pathological gamblers. Horse race gamblers (a “skill” game) sought heightened arousal but electronic gaming machine players (a chance game) appeared to seek dampened arousal. Among youth, sensation seeking was associated with gambling frequency but not with the development of a gambling disorder.

4.1 Positive Youth Development

According to Larson, high rates of boredom, alienation, and disconnection from meaningful challenge are typically not signs of psychopathology but, rather, signs of deficiency of positive youth development. Furthermore, many cases of problem behavior, such as drug use, aggression, premature sexual activity, and minor delinquency, may also be related to an absence of a positive life trajectory. Although involvement in extracurricular activities, such as sports, art, and drama clubs, has been clearly demonstrated as beneficial in reducing high-risk behaviors and increasing academic success, these advantages are not being fully promoted by schools or engaged by a significant number of today’s youth. Due to a variety of factors, many schools are not fully addressing the mental and other health needs of children and youth. Unfortunately, most efforts have been focused on when and how things go wrong for youth, while neglecting the positive aspects. Indeed, today’s schools are so focused on the development of academic skills and raising test scores that health promotion and the benefits of extracurricular activities are largely ignored.

After-school programs offer an alternative that can aid in the promotion of positive youth development and provide a diversion between 3:00 and 8:00 pm, the peak hours for violent juvenile crimes. The development of “assets” has been key to a number of successful after-school programs. Survey data collected by the Search Institute identified 40 developmental assets that young people need to build in order to be healthy and successful. The survey data revealed the protective power of assets: The more assets a child has, the more likely it is that he or she will do well in school, engage in community service, and value diversity, and the less likely it is that the young person will engage in risk-taking behaviors such as drug or alcohol abuse, drop out of school, or engage in violent behavior. These assets are commonsense values and experiences that help youth to grow up caring, healthy, and responsible. Applying the assets as a framework for positive youth development provides schools and communities with a set of factors that are associated with fewer risk behaviors and increased health. Furthermore, the assets provide a common language for talking about what young people need and for pulling people together across different social groups.

Structured voluntary activities have promoted positive youth development and may be a key to successful in-school social and emotional learning. An adolescent’s time is too often spent in two opposite experiential domains. In school, youth experience concentration and challenge without being intrinsically motivated. Conversely, in most leisure activities, they report experiencing intrinsic motivation but a lack of challenge and concentration. An exception to this is structured voluntary activities. Voluntary activities are those with rules, constraints, and goals as well as those in which the adolescent is highly motivated to be involved. They include sports, arts, hobbies, and participation in youth organizations. Based on a review of the literature, Larson concluded that involvement in structured voluntary activities is associated with multiple positive outcomes, including the development of initiative, greater achievement, and diminished delinquency. Thus, schools promote positive youth development when they provide opportunities for youth to engage in service learning and/or structured activities that contain the elements of intrinsic motivation, concentration, and challenge.

In recent years, a number of national reviews of school-based prevention programs have been performed to determine “best practices” in positive youth development. Using core competencies of social and emotional learning (SEL) as a basis for evaluation of programming and implementation, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) reviewed 81 programs that met its rigorous review standards. Following a 3-year review process, CASEL identified 22 programs that met its final criteria of outstanding SEL instruction, evidence of effectiveness, and outstanding professional development. Many of the programs selected were for all grade levels (K–12) because evidence-based/effective SEL programming typically begins at an early age and continues through high school.

Coping

Because of music's capacity to enhance moods, relieve boredom and loneliness, it is often used as a strategy to cope with problems. At least three processes may be at work when using music for coping with trouble. First, the qualities of the music itself are important to change mood, for example, airy, energetic music may help to lift feelings of gloominess and depression. Second, adolescents may feel the lyrics of the music they listen to reflect their situation, and in that sense music is used to contemplate on and work through problems. Third, young people may perceive the artist singing these lyrics as a person who cares for them and expressively voices problems they face themselves. By listening to music, young people can feel lovingly addressed and comforted by their favorite artist and the sentiments that seem to express feelings of hurt, loneliness, confusion, angriness, desperation, and uncertainty they are feeling themselves.

In his studies on heavy metal fans in the 1980s and 1990s, Jeffrey Arnett has studied the fact that adolescents may not only choose uplifting music when troubled, but may also wallow in music that is musically and lyrically dark, gloomy, depressing, or angry, aggressive, and rebellious. However, it has been suggested that the net result for most young listeners is positive as comparisons to the persons and situations described in these songs may dwarf the magnitudes of one's own problems. This identification with the artists and fellow fans enhance the sense that one is not alone with one's problems. Music eliciting negative emotions may be used in a purgative way and help to give meaning to and help work through negative emotions and experiences. Most young people using dark music to cope with problems find that this strategy works. For the small minority for whom sad and angry music deepens their own feelings of angst, alienation, and aggression, these negative music effects may be an indicator of serious personal problems.