Cyberloafing And E-management

The Internet has contributed to the enhancement of employee productivity and revolutionized the ways by which work is conducted. According to a 2011 CNNIC report, currently Mainland China has an estimated 160 million people that access the Internet in the workplace, and this number is rising. Technological web advancements have improved both employee productivity and work efficiency, but subsequently have also opened up new opportunities for employees to engage in "cyberloafing" behavior (non-work-related use of the Internet during work hours). Some cyberloafing behavior can be relatively benign (e.g., checking headlines at sina.com), while other types are more time consuming (e.g., online shopping and gaming) and thus can significantly reduce productivity.Theoretically, cyberloafing behavior is a distinctive workplace deviance behavior, ultimately resulting in work productivity losses. Organizations have implemented countermeasures to control cyberloafing behavior (e.g., e-management policy and IT monitoring software), but we speculate the implementation of these measures have not successfully mitigated this behavior.Considering the large scale impact that cyberloafing behavior has on companies and the limited Chinese contextual research that has been conducted on employee cyberloafing, the purpose of this study is to explore cyberloafing behavior in a Chinese context by adopting a procrastination theory to investigate cyberloafing from a new perspective and develop a Chinese cyberloafing scale. Lastly, e-management countermeasures and strategies are discussed.The research is composed of three stages:Stage# 1:After conducting 10 interviews with general employees and company managers on their workplace web usage experiences, we integrated related research conducted overseas and classified 33 different workplace web-activities. The results provided us with a clearer understanding of and more accurate classifications for cyberloafing behavior.Stage#2:The goal of this research was to develop a China-specific Work Web Use (WWU) and Personal Web Use (PWU) scale for measurement. By applying prominent behaviors obtained from our interview analysis, we designed a 33-item Internet behaviors scale and administered this scale to 53 Chinese employees to measure the perceived degree of each item's work relatedness. Following quantitative restructuring, we defined 10 personal-related and 11 work-related web activities, which were applied in the third part of our research.Stage#3:Integrating the results from the two previous research stages along with related literatures we developed a multi-variable questionnaire to test a potential mechanism for explaining cyberloafing behavior and provide feasible e-management countermeasures. We administered paper-based questionnaires at five Starbucks locations throughout Hangzhou and received the participation of 208 customers, all of whom are employed full-time. After conducting scale reliability and validity analyses, we executed a multi-level regression analysis on the variables involved in the study and found that procrastination and compulsive Internet tendencies are strong predictors of cyberloafing behavior and PWU during working hours, therefore confirming procrastination as a new theoretical cyberloafing perspective.Our research suggests that cyberloafing is in fact a form of workplace deviance and that employees are fully aware that the use of the Internet for personal use during working hours violates company policy, but this behavior is considered low-risk in comparison with other workplace deviance behaviors and therefore increases the likelihood of employees engagement. Furthermore, compulsive Internet behavior is a strong indicator of cyberloafing use and can be applied by managers to predict e-behavior, develop e-management and increase work efficiency.