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New communication technologies, increased virtual communication, and the intense pressure for managers and employees to be continually available and “online” are giving rise to a new and emerging workplace behavior: multicommunicating (MC), or the managing of multiple conversations at the same time. Whereas researchers in psychology and management have studied the phenomenon of multitasking, few have examined multitasking where one juggles not just multiple tasks but multiple people and often multiple media at the same time. We use the spiral theory of incivility to investigate the relational outcomes of MC from the perspective of the communication partners being juggled. Our research extends this theory by further exploring the starting point of the spiral and—through the application of social exchange theory—suggesting several antecedents to incivility that are important in the context of MC. Employing a survey methodology, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected to test the theory (n = 324) and were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis and structural equation modeling. The results suggest several factors influencing the partner's perceptions of focal individual incivility during MC, including who initiates the conversation, whether one of the conversations being juggled is useful to the other conversation, the focal individual's performance during the conversation, whether the focal individual is more accessible to the partner, and whether the partner is certain of or only suspects the existence of the other conversation. Further, partners' perceptions of these factors are influenced by their individual orientations toward MC. Finally, the partners' perceptions of the focal individual's incivility influence their interpersonal trust in the focal individual.
Cameron et al. (Wed,) studied this question.