Cyberloafing in the workplace: mitigation tactics and their impact on individuals’ behavior

With the Internet permeating every aspect of daily life, organizations of all types are increasingly concerned about the degree to which their employees are cyberloafing by shirking their work responsibilities to surf the Internet, check e-mail, or send text messages. Although technological interventions against cyberloafing have been shown to be effective, they might be perceived by employees as an invasion to their privacy, and are expected to have repercussions on employee behavior and loyalty. The main objectives of this study are to (1) examine how the introduction of such technological interventions might affect employees’ emotions and fairness perceptions, and (2) understand the effect of the interventions on behavioral outcomes, i.e., employees’ intentions to cyberloaf and their loyalty to the company. We developed a justice-based framework that we empirically test using a field experiment composed of field surveys complemented with hypothetical scenarios describing new organizational initiatives to curb employees’ cyberloafing. Our findings suggest that technological interventions, although associated with perceptions of unfairness, are effective at controlling cyberloafing, albeit at the expense of employee loyalty. On the other hand, contrary to prior findings, we find that fairness perceptions of technological interventions, although reinforcing employee loyalty, are ineffective at curbing cyberloafing. These findings are especially enlightening in that they contradict a common belief that perceived fairness encourages employees, as a sign of their appreciation for this fairness, to curb their misuse of IT. The findings also help managers fine-tune their cyberloafing policies to achieve a long-lasting remedy to their employees’ cyberloafing while maintaining a necessary level of employee loyalty.