An examination of the link between interest incongruence and employee cyberloafing from an ego depletion perspective

Abstract Since cyberloafing has become prevalent across organizations, scholars have increasingly focused on exploring its antecedents. Based on ego depletion theory, we explore how and when interest incongruence, a particular type of person‐environment misfit, influences employee cyberloafing behaviours. Using three‐wave survey data of a sample from 443 Chinese employees, we found that interest incongruence is associated with ego depletion, leading to employee cyberloafing. Furthermore, our results demonstrated the moderating roles of trait self‐control and moral identity internalization in the interest incongruence‐ego depletion‐cyberloafing link at different stages. Specifically, trait self‐control mitigated the effect of interest incongruence on ego depletion and the indirect effect of interest incongruence on cyberloafing via ego depletion. Moral identity internalization mitigated the effect of ego depletion on cyberloafing and the indirect effect of interest incongruence on cyberloafing via ego depletion. These findings suggest that employee cyberloafing is not only an immoral issue but also a behaviour affected by employees' self‐regulatory resources.