The Interactive Influence of Techno-Invasion and Psychological Safety Climate on Employees’ Cyberslacking

Cyberslacking, or the non-work-related use of information technologies (ITs) at work, has long been a critical concern for organizations. Previous studies have been dedicated to investigating the roles of personal or situational factors in both enabling and inhibiting employees’ cyberslacking. To complement this earlier work, this study integrates insights from neutralization theory and research on team climates to propose that cyberslacking is driven by both direct situational stimuli and indirect environmental approvals that are associated with the “constant connectivity” resulting from IT use—termed techno-invasion—and the shared belief in the safety of taking interpersonal risks—termed psychological safety climate (PSC). We argue that techno-invasion and PSC interact such that the influence of techno-invasion on the need to neutralize cyberslacking is stronger with a higher PSC. We extend our model to show that by amplifying cyberslacking, the interaction of techno-invasion and PSC indirectly influences employees’ job performance. We plan to use a cross-level design and conduct a multi-source, multi-wave questionnaire survey among employees and their team leaders to test our hypotheses. We expect to enrich the existing understanding of the driving mechanism of cyberslacking, extend the current neutralization framework, and unravel PSC’s unintended role in providing social approval of workplace IT-related deviant acts.