The effects of task characteristics on task planning and procrastination

• Autor(a) principal: Cruz, Marta Quintela
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/26142
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The purpose of this article is to address procrastination from a time planning and time prediction perspective. Three reasons are ascertained as to why people procrastinate, namely unanticipated interruptions, forgetting the task at hand and creating task conflicts during planning. However, since the effects of different types of tasks on procrastination have not yet been addressed, this research aims to fill in the existing gap on this field of study by giving continuation to the research project developed by Fernandes (2013). Initially, the existing literature on procrastination, propensity to plan and different task types (Number of people involved in the task; Complexity of the task; Consumption Tasks and Attractiveness of the task) is reviewed in order to develop an exploratory and descriptive study on the prevalence of each type of task on the relationships with procrastination. By analysing the effect of the different task characteristics and respondent’s proposed scheduled time for their execution, the results show that tasks perform by more than one person (multiple), with certain consumption natures, with a higher level of complexity and that were considered fun were the ones scheduled for the latest slots. The application of a mediation model, allowed us to conclude that task attractiveness and task complexity serve as mediators of the relationship between tasks with consumption nature and time scheduled. There are several implications for marketers and managers that can be taken out from this study. Firstly it is important to understand such behaviours in the consumption environment in order to develop tools, i.e. customer rewards, to overcome the procrastination and planning problem.