Abusive Supervision and Cyberloafing in Sri Lanka’s Public Sector: The Moderating Effects of Moral Disengagement and Negative Reciprocity Beliefs

Abstract

In public sector organizations, where hierarchical authority structures are prevalent, supervisory mistreatment can undermine employee motivation and encourage subtle forms of workplace deviance. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), this study investigates abusive supervision as an antecedent of cyberloafing among public sector employees in Sri Lanka. Specifically, it examines the moderating roles of moral disengagement and negative reciprocity beliefs in the relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing. Adopting a deductive, quantitative research design, time-lagged data were collected from 209 employees working in five divisional secretariat offices in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. Hierarchical regression and moderation analyses revealed that abusive supervision is positively associated with cyberloafing (β = .28, p < .001). Negative reciprocity beliefs significantly strengthen this relationship (β = .14, p < .01), indicating that employees with strong retaliatory norms are more likely to engage in cyberloafing in response to supervisory abuse. In contrast, moral disengagement did not significantly moderate the abusive supervision and cyberloafing relationship (β = .06, n.s.). The findings highlight cyberloafing as a covert retaliatory response to supervisory mistreatment and highlight the importance of addressing abusive leadership and employees’ reciprocity beliefs in the public sector. Given that the data were drawn from a single regional public sector context, the generalizability of the findings to other sectors and cultural settings may be limited. Future research should employ longitudinal and multi-source designs to further unpack the psychological mechanisms linking supervisory abuse and cyberloafing.