Disentangling How Coworkers and Supervisors Influence Employee Cyberloafing: What Normative Information Are Employees Attending To?

Abstract

Cyberloafing—the use of an electronic device at work for an activity that an immediate supervisor would not consider work-related—is now the most common way that employees waste time at work. It is well established that social norms play a role in cyberloafing, but it is unknown what specific normative information employees attend to when deciding whether or not to cyberloaf. In Study 1, we tested which of four types of normative information could underlie the observed correlation between social norms and cyberloafing. We found that both perceptions of supervisor cyberloafing and perceptions of coworker cyberloafing accounted for unique variance in cyberloafing, and also discovered some evidence that the approval of these referents also had the same effect. In Study 2, we cross-validated these results from Study 1 using a sample that was reasonably representative of the general working population—supporting the generalizability of our findings from Study 1. Furthermore, we conducted supplemental analyses (relative weights analysis and polynomial regression) to untangle nuances in how normative data relates to cyberloafing. In Study 1, we also examined the role of actual norms—as opposed to perceived norms—and found evidence that actual supervisor cyberloafing does influence cyberloafing through employee perceptions of supervisor cyberloafing. Overall, this investigation serves to clarify how social influence plays a role in the cyberloafing phenomenon.

Intention as a Mediator between Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Cyberloafing among Preservice Teachers of English

“…Likewise, a positive relationship between norms and technology use was also reported in some studies (Schepers & Wetzels, 2007;Teo & van Schaik, 2012). In the same line, research also supports the positive link between cyberloafing and descriptive and prescriptive norms (Askew et al, 2014;Askew et al, 2019) as well as the link between cyberloafing and descriptive and prescriptive norms with respect to both superiors and co-ordinates (Askew et al, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, a positive association between behavioral intentions and actual and perceived technology use have been reported by studies undertaken in the educational contexts (Schepers & Wetzels, 2007;Scherer, Siddiq, & Tondeur, 2019;Szajna, 1996). Moreover, intention to cyberloaf was also determined to be a positive correlate of cyberloafing behavior (Askew, Buckner, Taing, Ilie, Bauer, & Coovert, 2014;Askew, Ilie, Bauer, Simonet, Buckner, & Robertson, 2019).…”

Get employees talking through enterprise social media! Reduce cyberslacking: a moderated mediation model

“…For instance, individuals learn to behave through observations of others' behaviour (Bandura, 1988). Previous research has also consistently demonstrated that co-workers act as referents for employees' cyberslacking/deviance (Ehrhart and Naumann, 2004; Askew et al , 2018; Leasure and Zhang, 2018). Inspired by interpersonal behaviour theory, Koay (2018) has demonstrated the moderating role of constructive work environments on cyberslacking, as such environments provide unfavourable conditions for deviant behaviours.…”

Traditional cyberloafing, mobile cyberloafing and personal mobile-internet loafing in business organizations

“…Blanchard and Henle (2008) described cyberloafing behavior as "cyberslacking" (p. 1068), whereas Alder et al (2008) described cyberloafing and cyberslacking separately but the difference seemed to be blurred (p. 482). Askew et al (2019) included in their definition the perception of "immediate supervisor" for labeling an activity as cyberloafing (p. 526). Weatherbee and Kelloway (2006) acknowledged inconsistent use of different terminologies pertinent to this behavior but also noted that cyberloafing term was used particularly when "organizational internet" is used for personal reasons (p. 36).…”