Does supervisors’ mindfulness keep employees from engaging in cyberloafing out of compassion at work?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the appearance of cyberloafing at work, that is, the use of the company’s internet connection for personal purposes, may be due to a workplace that lacks mindfulness and compassion. The authors first hypothesize that supervisors’ mindfulness is related to the mindfulness of their direct followers, and that both are related to employees’ compassion at work. The authors also hypothesize that compassion mediates the link between supervisors’ and followers’ mindfulness and cyberloafing, and that empathic concern mediates the link from compassion to cyberloafing. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was distributed to followers working in groups of three with the same leader in all of the 100 banks in London (UK). Supervisors and their direct reports (n=100) and 100 triads of followers (n=300) participated. The authors applied structural equation modeling (SEM) for analyses. Findings Results showed that supervisors’ and followers’ mindfulness were significantly related to each other and to compassion at work, but compassion acted as a mediator only in the case of supervisors’ mindfulness. Empathic concern mediated the compassion-cyberloafing link. Research limitations/implications The study could suffer from mono-method/source bias and specificities of banks and their work processes can raise concerns about the generalizability of the results. Practical implications Findings suggest that mindfulness training may facilitate compassion at work, which, in turn, will restrain the occurrence of cyberloafing at work. Originality/value This is the first study to analyze how and why employees refrain from harming their organizations out of compassion.

Cyberloafing and cyberslacking in the workplace: systematic literature review of past achievements and future promises

“…5.3.1.3 Socio-demographic differences. The review suggests that most scholars have utilized socio-demographic indicators, like education (Agarwal and Avey, 2020), marital status (Wu et al, 2020), organizational tenure (Cheng et al, 2020), age and gender (Hensel and Kacprzak, 2020;Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara et al, 2019), as control variables. However, few studies have also found socio-demographic-related differences in cyberloafing (Sheikh et al, 2015), the results have been inconsistent.…”

Authoritarian leadership and cyberloafing: A moderated mediation model of emotional exhaustion and power distance orientation

“…For example, gender, Big-Five personality, perceived overqualification, and job demands can all effectively predict employees’ cyberloafing behavior. Similarly, some scholars have examined the impact of leadership styles on cyberloafing, such as abusive supervision ( Agarwal and Avey, 2020 ) and leader mindfulness ( Zoghbi-Manrique-De-Lara et al, 2020 ), but there is still a lack of attention to the multiple leadership styles, particularly the authoritarian leadership prevalent in Chinese organizational context.…”

Cyberslacking for Coping Stress? Exploring the Role of Mindfulness as Personal Resource

“…It was found that mindfulness significantly reduced mind wandering while using technology such as smartphones. In this line, Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara et al ( 2020 ), however, focused their study on exploring leaders’ and followers’ mindfulness. They studied these variables with cyberloafing, compassion and empathic concern.…”

“…Some research studies regard cyberslacking to be positively associated with employee satisfaction, work motivation and increased communication among employees (Janicke-Bowles, et al, 2019 ; Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara et al, 2019 ). Thus, considering cyberslacking as an act of distraction (Lim & Chen, 2012 ), its association with job stress and related phenomenon are areas that are unexplored in literature.…”