Cyberloafing, a new type of deviant workplace behavior, has become widespread across organizations. Although there has been an increasing amount of research on cyberloafing, it is unclear whether its influence on employee task performance is linearly positive or negative. To reconcile such an inconsistency, we developed and tested a model, grounded in the effort-recovery model, considering a potential curvilinear relationship between cyberloafing and task performance while also examining the mediating role of relaxation. We further reasoned that this indirect curvilinear effect (...) is contingent on employees’ time management skill. To test our theoretical model, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, multi-time data collected from 243 Master of Public Administration (MPA) students showed that cyberloafing had an inverted U-shaped (curvilinear) relationship with task performance, and relaxation mediated this relationship. In Study 2, using a sample of 392 public sector employees, we replicated the results of Study 1 and found that time management skill moderated the curvilinear effect of relaxation on task performance, as well as the indirect curvilinear effect of cyberloafing on task performance via relaxation. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are further discussed. (shrink)

Research on cyberloafing has primarily focused on its consequences on cyberloafers themselves. We shift this focus away from the cyberloafers, focusing instead on the dual reactions that cyberloafing generates for observers. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, we hypothesize that witnessing colleagues’ daily cyberloafing induces daily relative deprivation among observers, which in turn reduces their daily work effort and increases their daily badmouthing. Additionally, colleagues’ relative performance attenuates the positive relationship between observed daily cyberloafing and daily relative deprivation, such that observers (...) experience less daily relative deprivation when their colleagues are relatively high performers. To test this, we conducted a daily survey of 128 employees over 10 workdays. The empirical results supported our theoretical model. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)