Cyberloafing or cyberslacking is a term used when employees excessively surf the Internet during work hours for non-work related activities. With the indispensable use of the Internet at workplaces today, this has become an all-pervasive problem for contemporary organizations causing an alarming financial loss. Activities pertaining to cyberloafing include playing games online, online shopping, online gambling, and using social networking sites and adult websites, to name a few. Based on the available literature, this paper defines cyberloafing, the antecedents and consequences to cyberloafing and also the measures to curb it. The primary factors that lead to cyberloafing are lack of organizational justice, lack of job involvement, attitude towards the job, and job monotony, and personal factors such as stress, boredom and procrastination. The consequences of cyberloafing include not only better creativity, better job satisfaction and a better learning environment but also decline in productivity, loss of intellectual property, data thefts and loss in time. Measures to reduce cyberloafing comprise putting in place Internet monitoring systems, policies that restrict the access of certain sites, and use of firewalls whilst at work. Further areas of research should focus on psychological experiments and empirical analyses of end-user behavior to get deeper understanding about cyberloafing.

The ubiquitous presence of computing has undoubtedly changed not only the way we work today, but also the way people avoid and sabotage work. In today’s age, the Internet serves as a mechanism to “communicate, transact, entertain, educate and improve the connectivity and productivity” (Scruby, 1999, p. 2). The Internet plays an extremely important role in ensuring the ease of performing multifarious transactions to businesses. This helps to reduce costs, shorten product cycle times, market products and services more effectively (Anandarajan et al., 2000). The Internet has its own repercussions and thus companies should deploy it to employees with caution, as it exposes employees to many counterproductive activities during work hours (Anandarajan and Simmers, 2004).

Cyberloafing (Polito, 1997) is a term used for employees who slack off excessively surfing the Internet during work hours for non-work related activities. It is also called cyberslacking (Greengard, 2000) which is wasting of time and company resources by entertaining oneself on the Internet instead of working (Marron, 2000). Some researchers call this “cyber deviance” (Vitak et al., 2011), “cyber-budging” (Mills et al., 2001) or a technologically mediated manifestation of procrastination wherein individuals use different web pages for their own purposes during the office hours. Certain examples of cyberloafing include online shopping (Eastin et al., 2007; Madden, 2009; and Andreassen et al., 2014), using personal social media sites (Henle and Blanchard, 2008) and playing video games (Madden, 2009; and Reinecke, 2009).

Organizational Behavior Journal, Cyberloafing, The Di(sguised)gital Way, Loafing on the Job