Impacts of irrelevant information seeking to the productivity of Information Technology professionals

• Autor(a) principal: Vitoriano, Maria Albeti Vieira
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Gasque, Kelley Cristine Gonçalves Dias
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Em Questão (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/EmQuestao/article/view/80342
• topic: Busca de informação. Cyberloafing. Informação não relevante. Informação relevante. Sobrecarga de informação

This article is the result of a doctoral research developed with professionals from the Information Technology infrastructure area, who work in the Distrito Federal (federal district). It uses a quantitative-qualitative methodology, with questionnaires application and individual interviews of semi-structured nature. The results show that these professionals are connected most of the time during the work and, in general, accessing information that is not relevant to their immediate task, a phenomenon called cyberloafing. The main reasons for the access are updates on the latest events, the reduction of stress level and the increase of the levels of technical knowledge. It has been recognized that cell phone access causes a distraction, yet many professionals have criticized their workplace for the practice of blocking websites and contents. The main impacts on the work are little use of the time for the development of the company’s tasks and diversion of attention. Organizations need to adapt to this new reality and find management and control solutions rather than opting for the exclusive use of tools to block access to certain types of sites and applications.