Do you feel like being proactive day? How Daily Cyberloafing Influences Creativity and Proactive Behavior: The Moderating Roles of Work Environment

Cyberloafing means that employees spend work hours and use the company's internet resources to check personal e-mail or visit websites which are not related to their work. Although most scholars and practitioners viewed cyberloafing as a form of workplace deviance or counterproductive work behavior, some scholars indicated that cyberloafing might be beneficial for employees' productivity. Thus, it is important to clarify whether cyberloafing is beneficial or harmful for both employees and organizations. Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we examined the daily relationships between cyberloafing on creativity and proactive behavior, and whether work environment plays any positive moderating role is examined. The experience sampling method was adopted and a twice-daily questionnaire survey conducted with 94 full-time employees from China for 10 consecutive working days. A total of 928 daily data points were successfully paired, and the multilevel path analysis were performed to test the proposed hypotheses. Consistent with our expectation, the results indicated that employee cyberloafing positively predicts creativity and proactive behavior. In addition, the facilitation of informal interaction and environment workplace quality strengthens the positive relationships between employee cyberloafing and creativity and proactive behavior. The theoretical and practical implications were further proposed.