Expressive or Instrumental: the Dual Perspective Model of Personal Web Usage at Workplace

IT devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones as well as Internet are playing extremely important role in both work and non-work fields. Meanwhile, IT facilities also blurred the boundary between work and non-work. With the ubiquity of IT devices and Internet at workplace, organizational employees nowadays increasingly engage in online activities for personal purposes, which are not related to work, during office hours using organizational IT resources, hereafter Personal Web Usage (PWU) at workplace. Previous studies have identified multiple motivations behind employees’ PWU behavior from different perspectives. By reviewing existing literature, we propose the dual nature of PWU with respect to its antecedents, namely expressive nature and instrumental nature. Accordingly, we develop a dual-perspective model of PWU, in which different types of antecedents as well as their interactions are explained. In specific, drawing from job demand-control model, we identify a new antecedent addressing expressive aspect of PWU, namely burnout. And perceived benefit is identified to be the antecedent addressing the instrumental nature of PWU in our model. The proposed model sheds new light on PWU research by proposing an important, yet not recognized previously, nature of PWU, and thus offering a framework to unify existing research and proposing directions for future research.