Antecedents And Outcomes Of Boredom: Why We Should Know?

• Main Author: Zaiton, Hassan
• Format: Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: H Social Sciences (General)
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/20732/1/Michael%20Teng.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/20732/
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

Purpose: This is a conceptual paper to review the antecedents and the outcomes of boredom among employees through a non-systematic existing literature of review. Design: This paper is divided into two parts. The first part is about the antecedents (causes) of boredom that occurs at workplace. While the second part elaborates on the outcomes (consequences) of boredom that persist for a period of time at workplace. The reviews were done based on several literatures from 12 studies published over a period of 15 years (2000-2015) that were carried out at different countries on boredom. Findings: Firstly, the author categorized the antecedents (causes) of boredom into three major precursor events namely task that lack of meaning, non-challenging task and individual perception which were supported with literatures. Each antecedent events play a significant role in arousing boredom at workplace that distract employees from performing. Secondly, empirical evidences from past researches have shown that job boredom is highly correlated with negative outcomes (consequences) such as health, performances and etc. In addition, it was noted that job boredom was largely investigated in western countries but not in eastern countries especially Malaysia. Even though it has been neglected, boredom remains as emotion at workplace that exists persistently in every occupations. It had been proven that boredom brought severe implications towards employees and organization. Researchers agreed that boredom shall receive more attention through researches and findings discussion. It enables proper intervention such as job enrichment and job redesign to be implemented to minimize boredom at workplace and thus worth to be further investigated. Type of paper: Conceptual Paper