The Spillunder Effect : How Unfulfilled Goals and Feedback Frequency Affect Task Performance in Sequential Task Environments

Our study investigates whether and how unfulfilled goals on an unrelated forthcoming task, negatively affect employee performance on the current task. We draw upon the theory of intrusion and predict that unfulfilled goals on the forthcoming task cause intrusive thoughts that decrease the performance on the current task. We further predict that the negative effect of unfulfilled goals is mitigated when the feedback frequency on the performance of the current task is high. We conduct an experiment and don’t find the main effect of intrusion but find that in the presence of intrusion, current task performance of employees who receive more frequent feedback is higher compared to those who receive less frequent feedback. Additional analyses provide support for our underlying theory and predicted causal mechanism of attention depletion. We contribute to the literature on performance management in sequential task environments and offer practical insights on the design of control systems