An Empirical Study On Employees’ Internet Abuse Intentions In The Workplace

Internet abuse in the workplace refers to employees’usage of the organizational Internet access during work hours for personal purposes. It not only leads to lost productivity of employees but also can cause other problems such as security concerns and reduced bandwidth, along with legal issues. So far, Internet abuse is the most rampant computer abuse behaviors in the workplace. Therefore, it’s critical for enterprises to figure out how to curb employees’ Internet abuse so as to regulate their network usage.To better understand the antecedents that drive an employee to commit Internet abuses at the workplace, on the basis of a systematic review on the past relative researches, this paper first defined the concept and types of Internet abuse. Then we reviewed and comprehensively analyzed the previous related researches. Basis on neutralization technique and rational choice theory, we build a conceptual model from the perspective of criminology to study the factors that affect employees Internet abuse intentions. Next, we design a questionnaire for this study adopted from the aforementioned classic scales. The model was then validated using survey data from428employees. We inspected and certified the measurement model and hypothesis by SPSS and SmartPLS, as well as quantitatively measured the degree of each factors’ influence on employees Internet abuse intentions.The study results demonstrate that the basic architecture of our hypothetical model is reasonableness. For one thing, our results indicate that gender, working years, and the Internet usage policies in the organization significantly influence employees’Internet abuse intentions. For another, neutralization techniques were found to have a significant impact on their Internet abuse intentions. The cost-benefits analysis of perceived security risks and perceived benefits were also found to play an important role in affecting Internet abuse intentions while the costs of perceived sanctions have no significant effect. The empirical results not only verified the conclusions of previous studies, but also had some new discoveries. For one thing, it provided a new perspective to study the deviant behavior in the workplace; moreover, it is of some reference significance to regulate employee Internet usage behaviors.