Workplace Ostracism And Cyberloafing: The Moderating Effect Of Job Embeddedness

Cyberloafing as a new type of sabotage is referred to any voluntary act of employees' using their companies' internet access during office hours to non-job related activities for personal purposes.With the speedy development of information technology and Internet,the prevalence and concealment of workplace cyberloafing will be increasingly promoted,and then cause negative influence to the individual performance and the organization efficiency.Therefore,the current study of mechanism of cyberloafing is of great practical and theoretical significance.Drawing on the transactional model of stress and coping,our research constructs a moderated mediation model to test how does workplace ostracism,a widespread interpersonal stress,lead to cyberloafing,and regard emotional exhaustion as mediating variable to further reveal the internal mechanism of how workplace rejection leads to cyberloafing,meanwhile,our study examines the moderating effect of job embeddedness on individual differences.Firstly,according to the recent literature,our study introduces the status quo of the research on workplace ostracism,job embeddedness,emotional exhaustion and cyberloafing,and then constructs the theoretical framework and model of our study.Next,the sample data were obtained through cross-period data collection via questionnaire survey,and we acquired 273 valid questionnaires.Ultimately,AMOS 24.0 and SPSS 23.0 software were used to analyze the sample data,and the following conclusions were obtained:(1)workplace ostracism has positive predictive effect on cyberloafing;(2)workplace ostracism has positive predictive effect on emotional exhaustion;(3)emotional exhaustion has positive predictive effect on cyberloafing;(4)emotional exhaustion is partialy mediated the relationship between workplace ostracism and cyberloafing;(5)job embeddedness including its two dimensions of organization embeddedness and community embeddedness positively moderate the relationship between workplace ostracism and emotional exhaustion;(6)job embeddedness and organization embeddedness positively moderate the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion on the relationship between workplace ostracism and cyberloafing while the effect of community is not significant.The contributions of our research lies in:(1)explores the mechanism of the interaction between workplace ostracism and job embeddedness on employees' cyberloafing,which enriches the study on the antecedents of cyberloafing;(2)integrates the psychological and practical perspectives of cyberloafing caused by workplace ostracism,which innovates the research on the internal mechanism of negative effects of workplace ostracism;(3)expands the theoretical perspective to explain the mechanism of cyberloafing,which enriches the theoretical explanation of cyberloafing with the framework of stress response theory;(4)in Chinese context,explores the "stuck" attribute of job embeddedness and its negative effects,and both of theoretical derivation and data analysis verify the possible negative effects of job embeddedness.