| The pervasiveness of the internet in organisations has greatly assisted employees in performing work tasks,but it also blurs the physical and spatial boundaries between work and nonwork.As a result,employees increasingly use their work computers or mobile phones to engage in personal internet usage(PIU).With PIU increasingly common in organisations,researchers and managers are becoming highly concerned about how it affects employees’ work performance,and prior studies have explored the influence of PIU on work performance by discussing how PIU affects employees’ personal resources.Despite the important implications,prior research mainly focused on employee in-role task performance,and little attention has been paid to employee extra-role task performance such as employee creative performance.Employee creative performance is critical for organisations to adapt the increasingly intensive market competition,that is always seemed as a key element to maintain organisations’ competitive advantage.Similar to in-role tasks,performing creative tasks also requires employees’ personal resources.However,performing creative tasks often includes uncertainty and risk,thus,employee creative performance may require more personal resources.Given the importance of employee creative performance to the organisation and its dependence on individual resources,as well as the possible impact of PIU on individual resources,this study aims to explore how PIU affects employee creative performance.Based on conservation of resource theory and broaden and build theory,this study investigated the impact of different types of PIU on employee creative performance,and introduced positive emotion and perceived organisational support as mediator and moderator respectively.This study conducted a daily diary study and surveyed 107 knowledge workers in China over 10 consecutive working days(n=1070)to test the research model.The results show that within-task PIU reduces knowledge workers’creative performance by decreasing their positive emotion,whereas between-task PIU promotes it by increasing positive emotion.The above relationships become stronger when knowledge workers perceive a higher level of organisational support.This study proposed and tested the potential mechanism and boundary conditions of PIU on employee creative performance,thus filling an important research gap of prior PIU research.At the same time,this study classifies PIU into within-task PIU and between-task PIU according to the timing of PIU,which is an important supplement to the classification of PIU in the existing literature.The findings are also useful for developing organisational policies to take advantage of the positive side of PIU while avoiding its negative side.On the one hand,organisations can implement different strategies for different types of PIU in management practice.The organisation can guide employees to transform within-task PIU into between-task PIU.On the other hand,in the daily management practice,the organisation can provide support for employees’ work and life to enhance their perceived organisational support,and then strengthen the positive effect of between-task PIU on employee creative performance. |
