An investigation into cyberloafing among student-workers

Abstract

Despite the evidence that an increase in cyberloafing can be unfavourable to firms, workers commonly view cyberloafing to be a no-harm activity and believe it does not have a significant impact on performance in an organisation. This study sought to find out if cyberloafing activities existed among student-workers in organisations in Ghana and how it affects their work. A descriptive survey design was employed for the study. The study participants were student-workers enrolled in  an MBA programme at a University in Ghana. Responses of 286 sampled participants were used for the analyses. The data analyses for the research questions made use of means and standard deviation. Independence sample t-test was used to test the hypothesis. Results from the study showed that the most cyberloafing activity of participants of the study was Instant messaging. The least cyberloafing activity of participants of the study was Online games. The results also indicated that males do more cyberloafing than females although there was no statistical difference between the sexee.  Conclusions drawn from this study have shown that cyberloafing is generally widespread at the office. Organisations need to orient and educate staff on the negative effects of cyberloafing in order not to waste the company’s productive time.