Dose Leader Cyberloafing Promote Or Inhibit Justice Rule Adherence?

Managerial adherence to justice rules is an important basis for employees’ fairness perceptions.When employees perceive that they are treated fairly by their managers,they will achieve high task performance,act OCB,stimulate innovation,and inhibit organizational retaliation,transgressions and turnover intentions.The antecedents of managers’ adherence to justice rules are one of the hot topics of scholarly interest,and existing researches has found that managers’ cognitive motives(including effect compliance,establishing fairness,and impression management)and affect motives(positive and negative affect)and personality traits(such as empathic psychology,self-awareness,and stage of moral development)are important factors motivating their adherence to justice rules;situational factors,such as justice rewards and workload,can also influence managers’ adherence to justice rules.However,scholars have overlooked how managers’ own behavioral factors influence their adherence to justice rules.It has been found that a manager’s prior behaviors affect his or her subsequent behaviors.For example,felt by managers who engage in abusive supervision will experience guilt and loss of moral credit,then they will amend abusive supervision by consideration and initiating support.Manager’s prior behavior may also influence his or her adherence to justice rules through certain mechanism.Given the popularity of Internet in workplace in current era,Internet has become an indispensable tool in managers’ work,but it also gives managers many opportunities to cyberloaf.This thesis focuses on the impact of managers’ cyberloafing on their adherence to justice rules.Cyberloafing refers to employees’ spontaneous use of the company Internet to browse non-work related websites and send and receive non-work related emails during working hours,which is considered as a kind of deviant behaviors.On the one hand,some scholars have found that cyberloafing can distract employees from completing tasks at hand,slow down work progress,and reduce working quality.On the other hand,some scholars have found that cyberloafing can give employees a break and make employees recover and that the information obtained from Internet can inspire creative ideas.Currently,there is no consensus on whether cyberloafing is positive or negative.This thesis explores when and why cyberloafing will have a positive or negative effect.In addition,most previous resesrches have focused on the antecedents and consequences of employees’ cyberloafing,assuming that managers do not do it.In fact managers usually use the power of their positions to hide their cyberloafing and are motivated to hide it in order to maintain management prestige and image.This thesis then focuses on managers’ cyberloafing and explores its outcome variables and influence mechanisms.Based on moral cleansing theory,this thesis propose that cyberloafing could hurt the interest of organization and employees,and that cyberloafing violates the professional ethics code and organizational rules and is against the intrinsic standard of behavior.Thus,the more frequent a manager’s cyberloafing is on that day,the stronger the guilt is.In order to cleanse the guilt,managers will take action to compensate for the damage of cyberloafing.When managers have high public self-awareness,they will adhere to justice rules to compensate for the damage of that day’s cyberloafing and eliminate guilt;when managers have low public self-awareness,they may focus more on core task accomplishment and devote more resources to core technical tasks,and reduce relation-oriented behaviors like adherence to justice.This thesis studied cyberloafing,guilt and adherence to justice on within-person level.It is reasonable to use experience sample method for data collection to capture the variance in these variables across days.This thesis used structural equation modeling to perform multilevel path analysis for all hypotheses.The results showed that managers’ guilt was stronger on those days when cyberloafing was more frequent.When managers’ public self-awareness was high,guilt promoted managers’ adherence to justice;when managers’public self-awareness was low,guilt reduced managers’ adherence to justice.Finally,this thesis presents the theoretical insights,practical insights,and shortcomings and future research directions in the hope that scholars will use a more rigorous research design to constructively replicate this study in the future.