A research on the relationship between cyberloafing and perceived professional ethics

Technology is changing rapidly. These rapid changes pave the way for many things that are done individually and organizationally to disappear or to transform and lead new phenomena coming into our lives. Continuing to evolve along with the technology, cyberloafing is a new phenomenon observed in organizations as a result of internet technology and considered to produce mostly negative outcomes. There are various motives for cyberloafing behavior. They include organizational political reasons, personal reasons, technological reasons and reasons stemmed from work related tasks. Personal reasons are classified under the headings of "personal characteristics", "ethical perceptions or religious beliefs of the person", "psychological resistance", "burnout", "attitudes of employees to cyberloafing" and "attitudes of the individuals toward manager behavior". Technological motives title on the other hand involves "using social media" and "the effects of social media addiction on cyberloafing" subheadings. Professional ethics has become a subject of debate for every profession today. Researchers investigating the negative consequences of cyberloafing behavior have also regarded cyberloafing as an unethical behavior. According to these researchers, cyberloafing is a form of behavior that cause wasting time, human and technology resources. On the other hand, there are also researchers maintaining that cyberloafing could possess a positive quality and focusing on the positive aspects of cyberloafing in their research. According to these researchers, employees may experience work stress due to various reasons. Cyberloafing behaviors contribute to reducing the work stress of employees and reducing their intention to leave the workplace. In addition, the use of internet in activities that contribute to the personal or professional development of employees in the information society may also have beneficial consequences for the organization. This research aims to determine whether professional ethics perceptions of public sector employees are related to cyberloafing behaviors. The study consists of three chapters. In the first chapter cyberloafing concept and its scope are covered. In the second chapter, the concept and scope of ethics and professional ethics are dealt with. Lastly, the third chapter comprised of research method, analysis, findings, discussion and conclusion. While the universe of the work is constituted of civil servants working in the public sector, the sample of the study has consisted of 182 civil servants actively working at Aksaray University. The data were collected by survey technique. A five-point Likert scale was used in the survey form. In scales, question options are ordered from the most negative to the most positive. The survey consists of 46 questions and 3 sections. The first chapter of the survey contains questions about the demographic characteristics of the correspondents. While the second part is about the professional ethical perceptions of participants, the third part contains statements about participants' internet usage behaviors. The data obtained with the survey were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics version 22 program. As a result of the analysis, there was a statistically positive correlation between cyberlofing factors and idealism at a weak level, while there was a statistically significant negative correlation between relativism and cyberloafing factors at a weak level. As a result of regression analysis Relativism and Idealism have been seen to increase as depending to significant cyberloafing and resting cyberloafing. Instructive cyberloafing was found to be significant for relativism factor but not for idealism factor.