Abstract
In the light of the information age, information overload research in new areas (e.g., social media, virtual collaboration) rises rapidly in many fields of research in business administration with a variety of methods and subjects. This review article analyzes the development of information overload literature in business administration and related interdisciplinary fields and provides a comprehensive and overarching overview using a bibliometric literature analysis combined with a snowball sampling approach. For the last decade, this article reveals research directions and bridges of literature in a wide range of fields of business administration (e.g., accounting, finance, health management, human resources, innovation management, international management, information systems, marketing, manufacturing, or organizational science). This review article identifies the major papers of various research streams to capture the pulse of the information overload-related research and suggest new questions that could be addressed in the future and identifies concrete open gaps for further research. Furthermore, this article presents a new framework for structuring information overload issues which extends our understanding of influence factors and effects of information overload in the decision-making process.
The Cost
Information overload is a decisive factor driving negative “work environments [that] are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy” (Dean and Webb 2011). Losses arising directly or indirectly from information overload are estimated at $650 billion worldwide each year (Lohr 2007)—an amount that equals the gross domestic product of Switzerland in 2015 (United Nations Statistic Division 2016).
Definition
A widely used standardized definition of information overload is still missing. Eppler and Mengis (2004) listed seven definitions of information overload in the business research literature. Similar to business research, prior research on information processes suffers from a lack of standardized definitions across different disciplines (Edmunds and Morris 2000; Meadow and Yuan 1997). A necessary starting point for this study is a working definition of information overload. This situation prevails in the 2000s (Hadfi and Ito 2013). Thus, a working definition of information overload is needed.
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Information overload is a state in which a decision maker faces a set of information (i.e., an information load with informational characteristics such as an amount, a complexity, and a level of redundancy, contradiction and inconsistency) comprising the accumulation of individual informational cues of differing size and complexity that inhibit the decision maker’s ability to optimally determine the best possible decision. The probability of achieving the best possible decision is defined as decision-making performance. The suboptimal use of information is caused by the limitation of scarce individual resources. A scarce resource can be limited individual characteristics (such as serial processing ability, limited short-term memory) or limited task-related equipment (e.g., time to make a decision, budget).
Coping Strategies
Conclusion
Discovering the effects of information search, selection, processing, and evaluation in the decision-making process and the occurring biases and limitations is key for out understanding of the decision-making process itself. This study incorporates a wide range of effects from the starting situation ex ante to the decision consequences ex post.
In conclusion, this review has some limitations to address. First, I include business-related research only and exclude other research fields (e.g., pedagogy). There might be insights into these areas which are relevant for business administration research as well. Further research might address this limitation. Second, I searched for the keywords “information overload”, “information load”, “cognitive load”, and “cognitive overload”. There might be relevant studies on information overload or related topics which do not use these keywords in their titles or abstracts. While the snowball sampling (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981) might be a valid strategy to reduce such errors, there might be further articles which are not cited in this review.
In this paper, I have provided some perspective on possible avenues of research regarding information overload following the three major trends. The avenues for future research that seem the most promising to me include the following. First, the interdisciplinary research regarding the link between digitalization, virtual organizations, and business psychology is a decisive uprising research direction, following the call for research from Eppler and Mengis (2004). Second, there is little research done to enhance our understanding of the interlinks between all five categories. Prior research merely focused on one to three of the categories. I look forward to research clarifying the interdependencies between the influence factors of the categories. More research is needed to understand the interaction between decision-maker’s emotions, his or her decision-making-related information processing, and the virtualness of the environment. I expect this research to have implications for emerging concepts and theories regarding virtual collaboration in organizations. Third, I encourage researchers to continue exploring the factors that make some decision-makers better information processors than others in different tasks and environments.