A study examined how interruptions function as cultural signals inside organisations, drawing on interviews with leaders, meeting recordings, and field observations alongside vignette experiments and a two-wave survey. It found that interruptions cluster around particular people and viewpoints, especially dissenting ones, and that senior figures are interrupted less and are often unaware of how unevenly conversational floor time is distributed. When shown recorded patterns, several executives expressed surprise at the gap between their sense of running open meetings and what employees actually experienced, saying they had not seen who was affected by the pace they set.
The findings were reported by MIT Sloan Management Review on 27 October 2026, drawing on related research published in the Journal of Business Ethics on workplace microaggressions and a follow-on interview-based substudy.
Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-10-27.