Don’t Waste My Time! The Development and Validation of the Wasted Time Perceptions Scale

Anecdotal evidence in popular literature abounds about how perceiving that others have wasted one’s time is a common workplace experience with potentially negative consequences. Yet, there is a dearth of rigorous empirical research into the subjective nature of this psychological experience and its effect on employees. A lack of construct clarity and the absence of a validated measure to assess perceptions of having one’s time wasted have held scholarship back. To stimulate research on this topic, building on the recent focus on subjective time in the literature on time and adopting an entity-based approach, we offer a definition of wasted time perceptions and develop and validate a measure of this construct. Our five-item measure of wasted time perceptions demonstrated strong psychometric properties across seven independent samples. Further, building on frustration–aggression theory, we demonstrate that wasted time perceptions predict core affective and behavioral outcomes in the management literature, above and beyond previously established predictors. We also show that our new measure is easily adaptable to, and differentiates across, different focal entities (e.g., boss, coworker, subordinate, customer) relevant to organizational scholars. Implications and future research directions are discussed.