Based on equity theory, if employees feel a sense of inequity, their organizational justice perceptions and job satisfaction are considered to be affected negatively. As a defense mechanism to undesired consequences, employees may use neutralization techniques, which pave the way for counterproductive work behaviors. Thus, when employees use “claim of relative acceptability,” which can be summarized as “in comparison to many others, my behavior is nothing at all,” in return to any injustice within the organization, the result may occur as a counter-productive work behavior. Cyberslacking, which is defined as the use of the internet for non-work-related purposes during working hours, is considered to be one of these counterproductive work behaviors. The aim of the study is to examine the effect of perceived organizational justice and job satisfaction levels of municipal employees on their cyberslacking behaviors. The results of analyses showed that perceived organizational justice and job satisfaction levels of employees are negatively associated with cyberslacking behaviors.
TopIntroduction
In today’s competitive world, developments in the area of technology have caused irreversible changes in both daily life and business life. In the course of events, organizations are obliged to use information and communication technologies (ICT) effectively to achieve their organizational objectives. So much so that, it has become almost impossible to work without ICT in organizations. A considerable amount of work activities such as business meetings, file tracking, and communication among organization members are now carried out via ICT. Additionally, these technologies have offered many advantages to organizations such as effective marketing, global interaction, accessible information, cost minimization, and instant communication between team members (Anandarajan, Simmers & Ingboria, 2000). Therefore, organizations operating both in private and public sectors have to adapt to developments in ICT.
As the representative institutions of public administration, local governments (Berkün, 2017) have to follow technological developments because of their critical relations with citizens. The progress evolving into electronic structuring (e-structuring) in public organizations brought along the necessity of using ICT more effectively for public service. Among the public institutions, municipalities are considered to be the organizations that have the closest relationship with citizens (Yıldırım & Öner, 2004; Zeren & Özmen, 2010). In this context, municipal employees have accounted for providing service efficiently to meet the demands of the citizens as soon as possible. Furthermore, they have to gain the trust, respect, interest, and support of the citizens to meet their demands sufficiently (Kocaman & Keleş, 2006; Akkaya, 2020) and maintain the continuity of interaction with them. Due to these reasons, the factors that affect the productivity and efficiency of municipal employees play a key role.
Undoubtedly, technological developments in the public sector facilitate the public service of municipal employees via electronic municipal (e-municipal) services and ‘electronic document management system’ (EDMS), the common use of electronic signature (e-signature) technologies, and integration with computer networks between departments (Belge, 2002). However, the widespread use of ICT in the workplace may prepare the ground for counter-productive work behaviors. Particularly, the lack of perceived organizational justice and job satisfaction are expected to eventuate in counter-productive work behaviors.
Counter-productive work behaviors (CWB) are consciously conducted by employees, violate organizational norms, and also have negative consequences for organizations (Robinson & Bennett, 1995; Appelbaum & Shapiro, 2006; Piccoli, 2013; Venkatraman et al., 2018). Perceived organizational justice and job satisfaction are considered as two of the main organizational variables that affect counter-productive work behaviors (Doorn, 2011). On the basis of Equity Theory of Adams (1965), employees are expected to exhibit counter-productive work behaviors if they are exposed to negative situations that affect their perception of justice and job satisfaction. As a neutralization technique, they may use “claim of relative acceptability” to legitimize their behaviors. At this point, ‘cyberslacking’ (Lim, 2002) is considered to be one of the contemporary forms of counter-productive work behaviors in organizational behavior literature (Weatherbee, 2010; Özkalp et al., 2012; Kaplan & Öğüt, 2012; Ünal & Tekdemir, 2015; Kerse et al., 2016).
Cyberslacking (a.k.a. cyberloafing, cyberdeviance, cyberbludging, cyber-slouching, junk computing) is typically defined as the non-work-related use of internet technologies during working hours with resources provided by the organization and mobile technologies (Lim, 2002; Anandarajan & Simmers, 2004; Lim & Teo, 2005; Henle & Blanchard, 2008; Kidwell, 2010; Liberman, Seidman, McKenna & Buffardi, 2011; Örücü & Yıldız, 2014). Online activities such as spending time on social media (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc.), online chatting (WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DM, etc.), online shopping (Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, etc.), or just browsing for non-work-related purposes are evaluated within the context of cyberslacking.
In the literature, cyberslacking is considered as a form of behavior that prevents employees from providing high-quality service and results in loss of time and resources. For instance, it was determined that as a result of employees’ non-work-related internet usage during working hours, a productivity loss of up to 40% may occur (Verton, 2000). Hence, it is important to examine the organizational antecedents that affect the cyberslacking behaviors of employees and generate solutions to decrease cyberslacking.