New insights for understanding workplace delay behaviours: A qualitative investigation

While the majority of the procrastination studies in the literature were conducted in academic and general-life domains, little is known about the types of delay behaviours people engage in at work.This qualitative study was to address this research gap by conducting semi-structured interviews with individuals from a variety of occupations to identify the adaptive and maladaptive aspects of delay behaviours in work contexts. This research has three main objectives: (1) to identify what types of delay people perform at work; (2) to discover why workers delay their tasks; (3) to identify the consequences of workers’ delay behaviours. Results of this exploratory study discovered some additional types of adaptive delay in which previous procrastination research has neglected. Such findings may function as a useful resource for future quantitative studies. The qualitative data of this study further revealed new aspects of antecedents and the mixed findings for the consequences of delay behaviors. Managerial implications and avenues for further research are discussed.