How and When Does Cyberloafing Facilitate Creative Performance? Understanding the Role of Browsing‐Related Cyberloafing, Knowledge Acquisition, and Job Demands

ABSTRACT The use of the Internet to accomplish organizational tasks has led to increasing interest in understanding the phenomenon of employee cyberloafing. Although much of the extant research has focused on the negative effects of cyberloafing, we advance the literature by examining how and when browsing‐related cyberloafing exerts positive effects on employee creative performance. We first theorize that browsing‐related cyberloafing facilitates creative performance by increasing knowledge acquisition. We further hypothesize that job demands function as a key boundary condition, such that job demands buffer the positive effects of browsing‐related cyberloafing on creative performance via knowledge acquisition. Our results from a two‐wave field study of 203 employees and their 35 direct supervisors in China (Study 1) and an experiment with 197 full‐time employees in the United States (Study 2) provide support for our hypothesized relationships. We discuss the implications of our research to the cyberloafing literature and to managerial practice.