Missing a deadline has a bigger impact than you might think: Study

Missing a deadline has more complex consequences than you might think.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that if you submit a piece of work late, people will think it’s lower in quality than if you were to submit the exact same work on time or early. 

This is because missing a deadline can prompt others view you as less competent – and therefore your work must also be lacking, according to the study.

“All the research that we could find looked at how deadlines impact the minds and actions of workers,” says study co-author Sam Maglio, a professor of marketing in the department of management at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.

“We wanted to know how a deadline impacts the minds and actions of others when they look at those workers.”

Researchers surveyed thousands of people in the U.S. and U.K. across 18 experiments and studies, including managers, executives, human resources personnel and others whose jobs included evaluating others.

They presented participants with the same examples of work, including advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product pitches, photography and news articles – and then asked them to rate it. But first, they mentioned whether it was either submitted early, right at the deadline or late. Respondents who were told it was late consistently rated the work as worse in quality than those who were told the same work was early or on time. 

“Everyone saw the exact same art contest entry, school submission or business proposal, but they couldn't help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was,” says Maglio, who co-authored the study with alumnus David Fang. 

The study, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, also finds there isn’t much benefit to submitting work early since evaluators tended to rank work submitted before and at the deadline as the same quality, meaning there’s no boost in an evaluator’s opinion of an employee who submits work early. 

Late submission made evaluators rate work about as negatively as work that had objective shortcomings in quality such as not meeting a word count. Furthermore, it didn't matter how late the work was submitted. Work submitted one week after the deadline caused both the employee and the work to be viewed just as negatively as work that was one day late. That remained the case if the employee gave their manager advance warning that they would miss the deadline. Even for an employee with a history of getting their work in on time, one missed deadline still damaged their competence and integrity in evaluators’ eyes. 

A missed deadline also led evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and they reported they’d be less likely to ask that employee to do other tasks in the future. The researchers note this could limit an employee’s opportunities to prove themselves and earn promotions. 

However, the reason behind the missed deadline mattered, researchers found. If it was due to forces beyond an employee’s control, such as jury duty, evaluators didn’t end up with as negative a view of the employee or their work as they did when the reason was one within their control. Researchers also found the negative effects weren’t as severe if the deadline or work were framed as not particularly important. 

“Communication around deadlines is vital. If it's a hard, and not a soft, deadline, you as the manager should let your employees know. If the reason why you missed the deadline was beyond your control, you as the employee should let your manager know,” Maglio says. “That seems to be one of the few instances in which people cut you a break.”

The results persisted across language, age and culture. A field experiment was conducted in a high school in China that had students grade pieces of art in a staged contest. The art was on a piece of paper that also included the date it was submitted, showing that one version came in after the deadline and the other was in early. Even though the kids were explicitly told to ignore all other details on the paper other than the art itself, the version submitted after the deadline received lower grades. 

“That study breaks down the power imbalance that usually characterizes boss-employee relationships. These judging kids didn’t set the deadline. This is a peer-to-peer evaluation. But the effect holds,” Maglio says. “It also makes the broader point that it doesn't really matter who set the deadline. In the eyes of the evaluator, any miss is a meaningful miss.”