Beneficial and Detrimental Effects of Cyberloafing in the Workplace

Abstract

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-workrelated 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.