What Happens When the Boss is Nose Down in a Smartphone

Executive Summary

Phubbing, the habit of ignoring the person you’re with in favor of your smartphone, is associated with a number of negative outcomes for our relationships and mental health. When managers phub their subordinates, it’s associated with lowered levels of trust, engagement, job satisfaction, and job performance. HR professionals should discourage phubbing by addressing the issue in management and leadership training and communications.

In 2012, a lexicologist, a phonetician, a poet, a debating champion, a crossword maker, and several authors gathered at Sydney University in Australia. Their mission? To create a new word to describe the practice of ignoring the person you’re with in favor of your smartphone.

The word they coined, phubbing, has been used in the media and in a few scientific studies, but hasn’t caught on in everyday conversation. Maybe that’s because the new term — a combination of phone and snubbing — sounds a little silly.

By whatever name, however, there’s little doubt that this habit is making our lives worse. Research demonstrates that phubbing is associated with unsatisfying conversations, poor relationships, and lower levels of happiness. This is also evidence that phubbing is taking a toll on our marriages and our mental health.

As it turns out, phubbing is just as rotten at work as it is in our romantic and social lives. In 2017, two researchers from Baylor University created yet another another term, BPhubbing (a combination of boss and phubbing), to describe “… the extent to which a supervisor uses or is distracted by his/her cell phone while in the presence of subordinates.” They found that BPubbing was associated with lower levels of trust in the supervisor. This lack of supervisory trust, in turn, was associated with lower levels of employee engagement.

This year, the same researchers — James Roberts and Meredith Davies — published results from two follow-up studies among 337 U.S. workers employed in a range of industries. Again, they found that employees who experienced BPhubbing demonstrated lower levels of trust in their supervisors. What’s more, they found that this lack of trust was associated with lower levels of job satisfaction. Finally, they found that that the lower levels of job satisfaction were associated with decreased job performance.

In short, we now have evidence that when bosses are distracted by their smartphones in the presence of their subordinates, those subordinates experience a decrease in supervisory trust, engagement, job satisfaction, and job performance.

It’s important to note that these studies are correlational, so we can’t know for sure if phubbing causes these negative outcomes, only that they are associated with them. (That said, the only way to demonstrate a causal relationship would involve an experiment, which, in this case, would involve some serious ethical and practical challenges.)

Compared to phubbing that occurs in social and romantic settings, BPhubbing may be particularly difficult to address because of the differences in power between manager and subordinate. Someone who is willing to call out a friend or spouse for phubbing is unlikely to hold their boss accountable in the same way.

Another special difficulty of curtailing phubbing behavior in the workplace is that managers may be ignoring their subordinates to deal with work-related emails or texts on their smartphones. In a workplace, this will probably be considered more acceptable than in a social setting, where the phubber is more likely to be checking browsing Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. In addition, managers may feel that BPhubbing is acceptable because their own managers engage in the practice.

Takeaways for the HR Professional

HR professionals should actively discourage the practice of BPhubbing. The topic can be incorporated into existing management and leadership training and coaching programs. In addition, the problem can be addressed in standalone training sessions and communications to leaders. In a workplace in which BPhubbing is the norm, tailored messages to senior leadership to set a good example may also be helpful.

Sources

Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2017). Put Down Your Phone and Listen to Me: How Boss Phubbing Undermines the Psychological Conditions Necessary for Employee Engagement. Computers in Human Behavior.

Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2020). Boss Phubbing, Trust, Job Satisfaction and Employee Performance. Personality and Individual Differences.