Young Adults Think It Is Appropriate To Text, Answer Phone Calls During Business Meetings

Young adults think it's OK to reply to a text message or answer a phone call in the middle of a business meeting, according to a new study Slash Dot reported.

A new study published in the Business Communications Quarterly investigated how professionals found various mobile-phone-related behaviors during formal business meetings.

Based on the study, 51 percent of young professionals believe it's appropriate to read texts during formal business meetings, whereas 16 percent of workers aged 40 and older believed the same thing. Forty-three percent of 20-somethings believed it is appropriate to write texts during formal business meetings compared to 6 percent of workers aged 40 and older.

In regard to phone calls, 34 percent of young adults believed it was appropriate to answer their phones during a formal meeting compared to 6 percent of workers 40 years of age and older.

Researchers Melvin Washington, Ephriam Okoro and Peter Cardon found that while older professionals considered mobile phone use during meetings as inappropriate or uncivil, younger professionals were more accepting of it.

Researchers also found people with higher incomes were more judgmental about mobile phone use than people with lower incomes.

Based off of two studies, researchers asked 204 employees at an eastern U.S. beverage distributor about what types of inappropriate cell phone usage they observed. From this, they identified eight mobile phone actions deemed potentially objectionable: making or answering calls, writing and sending texts or emails, checking texts or emails, browsing the Internet, checking the time, checking received calls, bringing a phone, and interrupting a meeting to leave it and answer a call.

In the second study, researchers administered a survey developed around those eight mobile phone actions on a 4-point scale ranging from usually appropriate to never appropriate.

According to researchers, it's unclear, at this point, if this pattern is the result of the early exposure to texting by the younger workers or the increased experience with interpersonal interaction at work of the older population.