Curbing cyberloafing: studying general and specific deterrence effects with field evidence

Although the General Deterrence Theory has frequently been employed to study the prevention of misconduct associated with computer use, the common reliance on survey data makes it difficult to measure the general and specific deterrence effects. We use one-group pre-test-post-test quasi-experiment based on data from a monitoring system covering 230 employees for nine months to study general and specific effects of two interventions: the reminder about possible punishment and the actual punishment. The interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) with ARIMA modelling employed to study the longitudinal effects of the interventions allowed to deliver novel findings. Punishing the violators of organisational policy affected both the punished and unpunished employees (decrease in cyberloafing by 41% and 24%, respectively). The effect was maintained for three months, that is until the end of our dataset. The punishment had a stronger effect on unpunished employees located closer in the organisational structure to the punished ones than on the remaining unpunished employees. Moreover, we show that reminder about the possibility of punishment brought no statistically significant effect, likely due to the earlier experience of punishment avoidance. We discuss implications for theory and designing organisational policies intended to curb cyberloafing.