The Environment of Task Procrastination: A Literature Review and Implications for the IT Workplace

Procrastination is an important source of losses in organizational productivity. It is also an interpersonal concern in work teams and often the cause of personal frustration. Rich accounts exist in the scholarly literature about an individual's personality and behavioral traits able to explain procrastinatory attitudes, but the environmental factors that moderate procrastination are less understood, and especially not so in information technology (IT) research. The study is a systematic review of the literature in four behavioral sciences. It seeks to organize procrastination-related factors that are external to the individual and to present implications for the IT workplace. Broadly, the authors conclude that the IT workplace is a rich tapestry of positive and negative sources of procrastination influences weaved into the timely fulfillment of tasks. They also reach at a surprisingly new understanding of Leavitt's system model (a model that has been in use for decades in the study of IT phenomena) (i.e., the existence of forces that act in opposite directions regarding procrastination).