You don’t need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails

• Published in: Organizational behavior and human decision processes Vol. 167; pp. 114 - 128
• Main Authors: Giurge, Laura M., Bohns, Vanessa K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.11.2021
• Subjects: Boundary theory; Egocentrism; Subjective well-being; Work connectivity; Work-life balance; Work connectivity; Subjective well-being; Egocentrism; Boundary theory; Work-life balance
• ISSN: 0749-5978; 1095-9920
• DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.08.002

•Non-urgent work emails during off-hours feel more urgent for receivers than senders.•This email urgency bias leads senders to underestimate receivers’ perceived stress.•The email urgency bias is further harmful for subjective well-being.•Senders can reduce the bias by explicitly noting their response speed expectations. Workplaces increasingly use response speed as a proxy for hard work, signaling to employees that the only way to succeed is to be “always on.” Drawing on boundary theory and egocentrism, we examine a problematic bias around expectations of response speed for work emails, namely that receivers overestimate senders’ response speed expectations to non-urgent emails sent outside normative work hours (e.g., on the weekend). We label this phenomenon the email urgency bias and document it across eight pre-registered experimental studies (N = 4,004). This bias led to discrepancies in perceived stress of receiving emails, and was associated with lower subjective well-being via greater experienced stress. A small adjustment on the sender’s side alleviated the email urgency bias (a brief note senders can add in their emails to clarify their response expectations). This paper demonstrates the importance of perspective differences in email exchanges and the need to explicitly communicate non-urgent expectations.