The Relationship Between Employees’Internet Addiction And Work Outcomes

The emergence of Internet was to make communications between individuals more convenient. Similarly, the introduction of Internet into workplace was to enhance work efficiency. However, things go athwart with more and more users being addicted into Internet, which has done tremendous harms to their daily lives and workings. In working environments, employees’Internet addiction is also closely related to their social issues, well-being, and job performance. Hence, we aimed to explore the influence of employees’Internet addiction on workplace ostracisms, subjective well-being and job performance at workplace.In this survey study, we adopted several questionnaires including Internet addiction scale, perceived workplace ostracism scale, job satisfaction scale, job-related emotional scale, and supervisor-rated job performance scale. We collected data from195participants working in different companies in Shanghai, and used description statistics, reliability and correlation analyses, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to analyze the data.According to the results, all the measures have acceptable reliability coefficients with a good-fit measurement model. The SEM result showed that Internet was significantly correlated with workplace ostracism, which in turn correlated with two work outcomes including well-being at workplace and job performance. Thus, workplace ostracism acted as a full mediator in the relationship between Internet addiction and work outcomes.In this research, we explored the negative correlation between Internet addiction and well-being and job performance with data from employees. The negative link between Internet addiction and positive work outcomes demonstrated that employees and managers should pay more attention on the severe problems of employees’ Internet addiction. In addition, the full mediator of workplace ostracism provided a direction of intervention in Internet addicts and also future studies on the mechanisms of how Internet addiction would influence work outcomes.