Sam Maglio is ready for his interview for this story right on time. The professor of marketing negotiated in advance to chat precisely 15 minutes after his class ended.

He knows the value of being prompt. He’s researched deadlines, and knows they matter.

In his recent study “On time or on thin ice: How deadline violations negatively affect perceived work quality and worker evaluations,” published in the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes journal, Maglio examines the unspoken judgments bosses make when their team members submit work early, on time or late.

He confirms that, except in rare instances, being late negatively impacts an employee’s reputation.

While Maglio suspected lateness was bad, he’d hoped being early would confer brownie points. Unfortunately, that was not the case. “If you're late, it says something about your lack of competence, and so you might not get hired again. But why can’t it be that if you’re early, people will think you’re really on top of your stuff?”

Time matters

Maglio calls himself a time researcher — his previous studies include one on how thinking about time impacts how much people save money.

For this report, he worked with David Fang, a Rotman Commerce graduate now doing his PhD at Stanford University who often looks at time and its relationship to technology. (The duo also published another study early in 2024 that explored the grammar tense people use when sharing experiences and how that influences persuasiveness.)

Using the platform Prolific, which pays respondents nominal fees for participation, along with more realistic field experiments, Maglio and Fang ran 18 different mini studies to measure the impact of deadline adherence.

For the first study, the duo asked participants to assume the role of manager — the second was the same but included actual managers — and evaluate work tagged as being submitted at different times. They were asked to rate the work’s quality, the integrity and competence of the worker, and note if they’d ask this employee to do projects in the future.

Participants rated work tagged as being filed late 50 per cent worse than timely submissions. And tardy people came off as 20 per cent less competent.

“When I do my controlled experiments, I tell my participants, ‘Don’t judge them.’ But they do it anyway,” says Maglio. “When people are forming impressions of others, they use any number of different pieces of information, even against their better judgment.”

Other iterations of the study explored other variables, such as the employee communicating in advance their work would be tardy, the work being important or not, the employee’s previous track record, and having various reasons for lateness.

For work submitted late due to external forces — such as jury duty — or work tagged as being not important and coming in a day after deadline, there was no negative impact. And being late for no reason was worse than explaining that the submitter forgot. Unfortunately for eager-beaver workers, submitting something ahead of deadline had no impact on impressions.

Maglio and Fang also asked participants to judge a university business competition. The fake student-written product pitches arrived at different times, sometimes forcing the survey responders to wait. The final experiment involved four classes of a real-life school in South Asia judging an art competition, with submission date and time noted on each piece — which they were told to ignore. In both those scenarios, again, lateness tarnished the view of the content and the person who made it.

The late penalty

Maglio says the halo effect can make people think positively of someone’s abilities because of a single attribute. “This is the opposite of a halo effect, where if you're late, then I assume that the words on the page or the art on the canvas, or whatever the deliverable is, is worse.”

He’s torn: On the one hand, employees should be reliable and complete tasks on time.

However, judging someone when they could be overworked, have family issues, could not get a hold of vital materials to do their work or simply needed more time, could lead to talented people getting a bad name at work. It’s another form of unconscious bias.

Maglio thinks pondering the subconscious impact of deadlines could help workplaces. “The advice for the worker is, don't be late. And the advice for the evaluator is, be aware of your hidden biases,” he says.

That’s not easily done, and for employees, it may be simpler to negotiate due dates more fully in advance. “I think people look at deadlines as an implicit contract. One person sets a deadline and another person, one way or another, seems to have consented to meeting it.”

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