Work Outside Work-hours, Not Work During Work-hours: How Digital Connectivity Leads to Cyberloafing

Using digital technologies to conduct work outside work-hours, a phenomenon called digital connectivity (DCON), is a prevalent behavior in the post-epidemic era. Despite growing research on DCON, little is known about why and how DCON may induce employee deviant behaviors. Using a comparative test of moral licensing and social exchange views, this article examines the link between DCON and workplace deviance, cyberloafing. Specifically, we propose that employees who engage in DCON driven by external motivation will feel more psychologically entitled. Further, we argue that DCON is perceived as an imbalanced exchange action that can induce a sense of psychological entitlement, which subsequently leads employees to undertake cyberloafing. Data from two multi-wave studies confirm that psychological entitlement mediates the association between DCON and cyberloafing and the moderating effect of external motivation. This study contributes to the DCON literature by highlighting the psychological mechanism underlying the detrimental effect of DCON.