Multitasking is prevalent in interpersonal contexts at work, such as in meetings, yet little research has focused on the impact of multitasking on interpersonal outcomes. Despite the benefits individuals might experience from their own multitasking, we suggest that others’ negative attributions may have downstream effects on how multitaskers’ work is evaluated – particularly their creative ideas. Specifically, we draw on construal level theory to examine how people’s multitasking efforts may backfire and result in lower evaluations of their creative ideas. Through a pilot study and two experiments, we demonstrate that although people perceive their own multitasking positively, observing others’ multitasking lowers creativity ratings, and this relationship is serially mediated through attributions of disengagement and low status.
