Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont Colleges, United States
In this paper, we explore the effects of job-unrelated distractions on employee performance. Building on cognitive resource theory, we hypothesize that major social events serve as stimuli—making it challenging to regulate attention and reducing employees' focus on the primary tasks—leading to significant errors. We investigate this relationship in a high-stake setting: the performance of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crews who are quasi-randomly assigned to 9-1-1 transports. Using the 2016 U.S. presidential election as the source of the distraction—a historically contentious event with largely unexpected results—we find that patients experienced higher rates of medication complications during transports on Election Day. Furthermore, our findings reveal that the distraction caused by the election extends beyond Election Day itself, with notable anticipation (pre-election) and retrospective (post-election) effects. We also identify conditions under which attention regulation is more challenging and the impact of these distractions is amplified: (1) when employees are fatigued, (2) when the task at hand is more complex, and (3) when patients are particularly demanding requiring higher levels of emotional labor. Our main results are robust to alternative specifications and subsample analyses.
