Instant messaging: benchmarking its impact in the workplace

Purpose This article aims to examine how adopting instant messaging influences knowledge creation, content quality, and interruption, as well as how these factors mediate the relationship between instant messaging adoption and team performance. Design/methodology/approach An online questionnaire distributed to 500 companies yielded 198 useable responses that were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings Adopting instant messaging significantly enhances knowledge creation and content quality and, counterintuitively, reduces interruption. Knowledge creation, content quality, and interruption each partially mediate the relationship between instant messaging adoption and team performance. Practical implications Challenging the notion that instant messaging fragments attention, this study demonstrates that instant messaging streamlines communication by channeling queries into exchanges that reduce unnecessary interruptions. Such streamlining enables teams to redirect focus toward strategic discussions by leveraging instant messaging's capacity to enhance knowledge creation and content quality while keeping interruptions at bay. Originality/value This article reveals that instant messaging adoption enhances knowledge creation and content quality and, contrary to expectations, reduces overall interruptions. This finding challenges the belief that real-time messaging inevitably fragments attention and further uncovers a paradox in which residual interruptions, though fewer, still undermine collaboration outcomes.