The Effects of Work Stress on Cyberloafing Behavior in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Today, work stress phenomenon is often brought to agenda due to high performance expectations of organizations and the increase of job and off the job problems of employees with rapid development of technology and increase of competition. While work stress has a positive effect on employees at a certain level, it may lead to negative results when it goes beyond this level. It is thought that the employees may tend towards loafing behavior as a result of work stress and these behaviors may enhance. Today, the most frequent loafing type which has come into our life is cyberloafing. Cyberloafing is that the employee uses the internet apart from the objectives of the organization within office hours. Social media is placed on the top with 78,8% of the individuals using internet within the first three months in 2014 in Turkey. As long as the policies for use of gradually increasing internet, computer and mobile devices are not determined, it becomes difficult to control cyberloafing activities. This uncontrollable power will cause productivity losses as long as it is not directed to organizational policies. In this study, it is aimed to analyze the effect of work stress on cyberloafing behavior based on the current literature and show the importance of it on the basis of higher education institutions. In the research, qualitative data will be evaluated by resorting to literature research as the quantitative method.