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Information Overload

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The Experience of Managing

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the problems of information overload that face many employees and many managers responsible for designing the jobs of other people. Information load is defined as ‘a complex mixture of the quantity, ambiguity and variety of information that people are forced to process. As load increases, people take increasingly strong steps to manage it’ (Weick, 1995, p. 87). Load is typically measured in terms of:

  • the number and difficulty of decisions and judgments that the information requires

  • the time available to act

  • the quality of information processing required

  • the predictability of the information inputs.

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© 1999 Paul Sparrow

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Sparrow, P. (1999). Information Overload. In: The Experience of Managing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27328-7_12

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