Are Breaks Always Helpful? The Interaction of Work Breaks and Working Memory Capacity on Accounting Error Detection*

Abstract

Accounting review tasks undertaken by supervisors are crucial in the discovery of discrepancies. Most individuals believe that in this context the majority of breaks taken are beneficial, rather than harmful, to work performance. This study explores the improvement that breaks can bring to accounting tasks and how individuals' working memory capacity (WMC) moderates the relationship between breaks and task performance. Through an experiment, we find that when breaks are assessed together with WMC, low-WMC participants who took a break between tasks did not perform better on a review task than those who did not take a break. Break-taking was most beneficial to review task performance for individuals with high WMC. Although prior break research has mostly been studied in a blue-collar setting, exploring the impact of breaks on performance in an accounting setting is important as psychology research findings do not always translate into this context.