Internet Abuse in the Workplace

The existence of Internet technologies in today’s workplace plays many important roles in supporting and enhancing employees’ internal and external communications, including supporting and sustaining organizational business practices. Nevertheless,unproductive Internet usage and abuse in the workplace are progressively becoming a major productivity drain. By extending the workplace deviance model to include unproductive Internet usage behaviors and adopting several important theories and perspectives, this chapter proposes an individual psychological framework that explains the deviant use of Internet technology (DUIT) in the workplace. It is hoped that the conceptual model will stimulate further empirical studies into the topic, with the ultimate goal being to understand, investigate, and prevent Internet abuse in the workplace.