CCE Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Systems (DISS)

Department

College of Engineering and Computing

Advisor

Yair Levy

Committee Member

Ling Wang

Committee Member

Inkyoung Hur

Keywords

Cyberslacking, Employee Commitment, Mobile device, Productivity

Abstract

While the introduction of the Internet facilitated the communication channels at the workplace to improve employees’ productivity, it also raised new challenges, such as Internet use for personal activities. Organizations face productivity losses due to employees’ involvement in counterproductive behaviors, such as cyberslacking. The frequency of mobile device cyberslacking is anticipated to increase due to continuous developments in online connectivity, applications, and the significant growth of mobile device usage worldwide. In addition, research has shown that employees’ commitment to their organization can encourage behaviors that positively influence productivity. Employee’s commitment is a crucial factor because it can benefit an organization in different ways, such as enhancing performance, decreasing absenteeism, and reducing turnover, thus, resulting in sustained productivity. Hence, limited studies have been conducted on the impact of employee cyberslacking using mobile devices and employee’s commitment to the organization on productivity. The research problem that this research study addressed is mobile device cyberslacking at the workplace as it relates to productivity. The main goal of this research study was to develop and validate, using Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), a Mobile Cyberslacking- Commitment Taxonomy using the measures of mobile device cyberslacking based on the self-reported frequency of cyberslacking (FCyS) and employee’s commitment to the organization (EC2O) to provide indirect indication for employee productivity. This research study implemented three phases. Phase One of this study, using the Delphi method, collected data via anonymous online surveys from 19 SMEs to evaluate and validate a set of items relevant to the measures of mobile device FCyS and EC2O, the survey scale, instructions to participants, and the Mobile Cyberslacking-Commitment Taxonomy. In Phase two, using a pilot study, a group of 35 participants were recruited to verify the validity of the survey instrument that was revised by SMEs. In Phase three, the validated survey was sent via email to assess six research questions. The final survey was sent to 1,063 employees who work at organizations in Saudi Arabia and use mobile device on a daily basis. The response rate was 24.93% with 265 usable records. The results of the study showed that employees were dispersed across the Mobile Cyberslacking-Commitment Taxonomy with 4.5% of the employees were positioned in the more problematic quadrant indicating that this portion of employees will not use their mobile devices at the workplace to improve their productivity. The overall results showed that the population had a low frequency of mobile cyberslacking and a high commitment to the organization, thus, have a better potential for productivity. Significant differences in the two constructs were also found across several demographics including age, gender, education level, industry type. Recommendations for practice and research are provided. Moreover, several areas for future research are also presented. The results of this research study contributed to information systems’ body of knowledge by providing researchers and practitioners a novel benchmarking tool of Mobile Cyberslacking-Commitment Taxonomy to enable the measure of employees’ FCyS and EC2O to classify employees’ potential for productivity in the context of the workplace.

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