Cyberslacking, engagement, and personality in distributed work environments

• Examines the linkage between personality and distributed work outcomes.
• Results indicate that Honesty and Procrastination are powerful predictors.
• Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness predicted distributed work behavior.

The modern workplace is becoming increasingly reliant on distributed work arrangements, in which employees work part- or full-time from home, coffee shops, satellite offices, and elsewhere rather than at a centralized location. There are questions about the role of personality in shaping work behavior during distributed work, particularly with respect to cyberslacking and work engagement as indicators of distributed work effectiveness. Cyberslacking can be viewed as an extension of typical counterproductive workplace behavior, and it involves distraction and putting off work to “surf the Internet.” Engagement can be viewed as the intensity of physical, cognitive, and emotional involvement with work activities. We found that non-Big Five personality traits, Honesty and Procrastination, were important predictors of these outcomes. Moreover, we developed three sets of intermediary behaviors linking personality to distributed work effectiveness: regular upward communication, self-management tactics, and conscious socialization efforts. Finally, personality profiles were identified with latent profile analyses in order to determine which “types” of people are more successful than others in distributed work.