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Digital Task Fragmentation in Modern Organizations: A Theory-Driven Model of Workload Dispersion, Coordination Costs, and Managerial Attention
Modern digital work environments increasingly fracture tasks across email, instant messaging, project platforms, customer systems, shared documents, dashboards, and video meetings. This article conceptualises this condition as digital task fragmentation, defined as the systemic dispersion of work activities across multiple digital tools, communication channels, and organizational interfaces. Unlike traditional interruption or individual multitasking, digital task fragmentation is embedded in the architecture of contemporary work systems. Existing theories of work design, coordination, information processing, and managerial attention explain important aspects of task demands, communication complexity, and cognitive strain. However, they do not fully capture how digitally mediated work fragments tasks across platforms while simultaneously making workload harder to see, sequence, and govern. The result is a growing theoretical gap between how work is formally designed and how it is actually experienced in digitally intensive organizations. The objective of this article is to develop a theory-driven model of digital task fragmentation and its organizational consequences. The model links fragmentation to workload dispersion, coordination costs, managerial attention depletion, and downstream outcomes for productivity, employee well-being, decision quality, and organizational agility. The article positions fragmentation as both a work-design problem and an attention-allocation problem. The article contributes by naming and theorising digital task fragmentation as a distinct organizational phenomenon. It shows how tool proliferation, always-on communication, and hybrid work arrangements disperse tasks and increase hidden coordination burdens. The proposed framework provides a basis for future measurement, empirical testing, and managerial redesign of digital work systems.
Journal of Digital Business and Management Studies
Original Research | Open access | 18 March 2026 | Article: 98
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