The Impacts of Internet Monitoring on Employees’ Cyberloafing and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: : A Longitudinal Field Quasi-Experiment

Many organizations have implemented internet monitoring to curb employees’ non-work-related internet activities during work hours, commonly referred to as “cyberloafing.” For managers, two primary considerations emerge: (1) the actual effectiveness of internet monitoring in diminishing cyberloafing and (2) any unintended side effects this monitoring might have on overall employee behavior. From a longitudinal field quasi experiment, we observed that although internet monitoring notably reduced cyberloafing because of amplified employee concerns about potential sanctions and privacy breaches, it unintentionally suppressed their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Moreover, a follow-up observation four months after introducing internet monitoring revealed that its capability to mitigate cyberloafing had weakened, yet the dampening effect on OCB continued. We conclude this paper by underlining the value of using internet monitoring as a feedback mechanism on employees’ online behavior, rather than solely as a deterrence measure.

Many organizations have adopted internet monitoring to regulate employees’ cyberloafing behavior. Although one might intuitively assume that internet monitoring can be effective in reducing cyberloafing, there is a lack of research examining why the effect can occur and whether it can be sustained. Furthermore, little research has investigated whether internet monitoring can concurrently induce any side effects in employee behavior. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal field quasi-experiment to examine the impacts of internet monitoring on employees’ cyberloafing and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Our results show that internet monitoring did reduce employees’ cyberloafing by augmenting employees’ perceived sanction concerns and information privacy concerns related to cyberloafing. The results also show that internet monitoring could produce the side effect of reducing employees’ OCB. Interestingly, when examining the longitudinal effects of internet monitoring four months after its implementation, we found that the effect of internet monitoring on cyberloafing was not sustained, but the effect on OCB toward organizations still persisted. Our study advances the literature on deterrence theory by empirically investigating both the intended and side effects of deterrence and how the effects change over time. It also has important broader implications for practitioners who design and implement information systems to regulate employee noncompliance behavior.

History: Yong Tan, Senior Editor; David (Jingjun) Xu, Associate Editor.

Funding: This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71901201, 72372150, 72025402, 71921001, 72293573, and 72034001], the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (HKU 17502921), the University Research Committee of the University of Hong Kong (201905159007), Theme-based Research Fund from HKU Education Consulting (Shenzhen) Co., LTD. [Grant SZRI2023-TBRF-02].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2020.0216.