Boredom at Work

Cynthia D. Fisher

Feeling bored at work is a common complaint; a large percentage of employees feel bored at least occasionally and some feel bored much of the time. Boredom has not been studied extensively, but it has attracted some attention from scholars in diverse disciplines including human factors engineering, psychiatry, sociology, education, criminology, and industrial psychology. Most scholars would agree that boredom is an emotion. It is an unpleasant transient state in which individuals feel an extreme lack of interest in their current activity. Bored individuals find it difficult to keep their attention focused on work and may feel that time is passing very slowly. Boredom is usually accompanied by feelings of restlessness, irritability, and desire to escape or change the situation to a more interesting activity. Boredom has been described as the opposite of enthusiasm or flow. Boredom is also sometimes conceptualized as a personality trait, and some individuals are more ...

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