From Competence to Caution: How Digital Literacy and Privacy Concerns Shape Cyberslacking Behavior

Abstract

The growing adoption of digital technologies in organisations in the public sector has transformed the work behaviour of employees, resulting in increased efficiency and possible counterproductive behaviours like cyberslacking. This paper uses the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) in analyzing the associations between digital literacy, online privacy concern, and cyberslacking in the context of digital transformation in the Pakistani public institutions. In particular, this study examines whether online privacy concern mediates the relationship between digital literacy and cyberslacking. Purposive sampling was used to select 366 full-time government employees, and the model was studied with the help of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4. The measurement model had good reliability and validity for all constructs. The structural findings found that digital literacy had positive effects on cyberslacking and online privacy concern. Moreover, online privacy concerns had a strong negative impact on cyberslacking and mediated the connection between digital literacy and cyberslacking. These results imply that more digitally literate workers are more likely to participate in online activities, such as off-work ones, but their increased level of privacy is a cognitive control mechanism that suppresses this type of behavior. In theory, the research expands the use of Protection Motivation Theory to online ethics at work by theorizing online privacy concern as a self-regulation process of cognition between digital competence and behavioral restraint. In practice, the results imply the necessity to consider digital ethics and privacy awareness as a part of digital literacy training to implement responsible technology use and ethical digital behaviour in the general organization.