Paper Type
Complete Research Paper
Description
With the ubiquity of various IT devices in workplace and the increasingly boundary between work and non-work, organizational employees nowadays increasingly engage in online behaviors for personal activities, which are not related to work during working hours by using organisations´ IT resources, hereafter Personal Web Usage (PWU) at workplace. Different even opposite opinions on the antecedents, impacts and regulating policies of PWU have been proposed in proliferating literature. It is our contention that discussing the nature of PWU is a necessary step to enhance our understanding to PWU. By reviewing previous research, we propose the dual nature of PWU with respect to its antecedents, impacts and regulating policies. For antecedents, PWU is both an expressive means for employees to vent their negative affections and an instrumental means for employees to pursu positive utilities. For impacts, PWU might have positive impacts in some circumstances and it could also exert negative effects in other ones. For regulating policies, discriminative policies rather than universal policy should be proposed in different circumstances. The dual nature of PWU facilitates to unify the different even opposite viewpoints of previous studies; it also provides guidance for future research by proposing multiple research qustions based on the duality of PWU.
THE DUAL NATURE OF PERSONAL WEB USAGE AT WORKPLACE: IMPACTS, ANTECEDENTS AND REGULATING POLICIES
With the ubiquity of various IT devices in workplace and the increasingly boundary between work and non-work, organizational employees nowadays increasingly engage in online behaviors for personal activities, which are not related to work during working hours by using organisations´ IT resources, hereafter Personal Web Usage (PWU) at workplace. Different even opposite opinions on the antecedents, impacts and regulating policies of PWU have been proposed in proliferating literature. It is our contention that discussing the nature of PWU is a necessary step to enhance our understanding to PWU. By reviewing previous research, we propose the dual nature of PWU with respect to its antecedents, impacts and regulating policies. For antecedents, PWU is both an expressive means for employees to vent their negative affections and an instrumental means for employees to pursu positive utilities. For impacts, PWU might have positive impacts in some circumstances and it could also exert negative effects in other ones. For regulating policies, discriminative policies rather than universal policy should be proposed in different circumstances. The dual nature of PWU facilitates to unify the different even opposite viewpoints of previous studies; it also provides guidance for future research by proposing multiple research qustions based on the duality of PWU.