Job Overload, Organizational Commitment, and Motivation as Antecedents of Cyberloafing: Evidence from Employee Monitoring Software

摘要

The study aims to investigate how organization-related factors, such as job overload, organizational commitment, and motivation, affect the level of cyberloafing. While research on cyberloafing has been blooming recently, most of the studies are based on self-reports. Thus the validity of obtained results is threatened by the possibility of deliberate response distortion resulting in the underreporting of cyberloafing. We address this issue by using a unique data-set collected by the organization-wide computer-tracking system. Data gathered from the sample of 379 employees whose computer usage was automatically monitored during a four-month period was combined with a survey intended to measure independent variables. We find that job overload is negatively related to cyberloafing and organizational commitment. The results allow questioning the inclusion of cyberloafing in the category of counterproductive work behaviors, while at the same time, they increase the validity of findings on the relationships between the studied variables and cyberloafing.