Does multi-tasking make an employee more effective and productive?

Multitasking is an art and ability. You need to find a right person. Such employee is a big asset to an organization. There are certain ways to test this abilityُ while hiring..

Multitasking, as suggests by studies, makes a worker distracted easily. Your attention is loosely spread accross3 or more tasks at a time therefore it makes you prone to committing errors and it definitely induces stress. Therefore multitasking does not make one efficient and productive in his/her job. It does however, shortens the time to complete the job, but the output may be substandard as compared to an output that has been given more thought and deliberately done.

 

Multitasking make sense when the organization is quite small. If it is a very large organization, then multitasking will pull down the productivity and cause delay across the structure. For a small organization those who have born aptitude and abilities for multitasking, are always an asset.

Multitasking is defined as doing (or trying to) do more than one thing at a time like talking on the phone and writing a letter at the same time.  Which, as studies have shown, is not possible; attention is simply being diverted meaning you are not really listening to the person on the phone and/or your are not really paying attention to what you are writing (as a test try writing something at the same time you are talking to someone ... reread what you have wrote, chances are you will be editing it.)  Or if you mean doing a bunch of tasks all of which are top priority well that is something else altogether and points more towards bad management / poor organization which should be addressed first before deciding if it is a good idea to give someone a bunch of things to do and expecting them to be done now.  So it seems that first, what is meant by multitasking needs to be defined.

Multitasking can positively contribute to an employee's effectiveness and productivity provided there are limits to what and how much is expected. It's all about quality and not quantity.

Multi-Tasking by an Employee is more effective if he does it with his own will. A Hard Work Done without Commitment and Belief is of NO USE at all. One should do the task as if it is his own responsibility, and not by force. It's not about working till late hours, it's about putting your heart in the work and finishing it off before time. Multi-Tasking is not an art, it's not within only few, infact if you have learnt the job well, apply and implement it at the right time and place, you work efficiently and produce great results.

it depends on the employee willing , but mostly yes and now its new trend to make satisfactory job with different skills needs and tasks

yes of course multi tasks is useful for employee to improve experience 

in my own opinion it is better to have a lot of tasks  

Effective? No. Productive? Yes

Multi tasking is an efficient mindset for the employee and assists an employee to complete various tasks more effectively. This is achieved as the mind is focused to think out of the box in different directions at one time. Working on a task can often leads to a solution on another task at hand as sometimes the jobs are co-related. This quickens the turnaround time. It also relieves the monotony for the employee which in turn makes him/her more productive.

Simply, my point of view that it does help the business if controllable and managed by one supervisor/manager only, which means it should be within one department or field and not related to various departments. On the other hand it's an added value to the employee him self as it's the greatest way ever to learn quick for those who are eager to learn.