Beneficial and Detrimental Effects of Cyberloafing in the Workplace

Employees may exhibit a variety of attitudes and behaviors in organizations. Some of them may be positive and beneficial for improving organizational climate and productivity, while others may be negative and detrimental to relationships and performance of employees. Positive attitudes and behaviors are usually prosocial and may be reflected in the form of commitment, identification, embeddedness, involvement, vitality, belongingness, friendship, innovativeness, creativity and the like. Negative attitudes and behaviors are generally counterproductive and may take the form of theft, sabotage, withdrawal, absenteeism, incivility, exclusion, selfishness, cynicism, dishonesty, bullying, aggression, violence, mobbing, revenge, sexual harassment and so forth. Along with these relatively conventional behaviors, one of the most recent type of behaviors observed with an increasing rate in the workplace is cyberloafing. This concept can be defined as employees’ intentional and continuous use of Internet for personal purposes during the work hours. Some indicators of cyberloafing are sending and receiving personal messages, reading daily news, following sports, playing virtual games, online shopping, monitoring stock markets, completing bank transactions, attending forums, blogging, online gambling, accessing adult sites, downloading music, watching popular videos, attending virtual communities, communicating with friends in social networking sites, producing and sharing non-work-related contents etc. Literature generally suggests that the line between personal Internet use and cyberloafing in the workplace is not very clear. Furthermore, there are both organizational and personal reasons of cyberloafing. Consequently, cyberloafing may have both beneficial and detrimental effects in the workplace. This paper first describes the distinguishing characteristics of cyberloafing, then explains the common causes of it, and finally discusses the conditions under which cyberloafing may have beneficial and detrimental effects