Uncovering a New Guilty Pleasure: A Qualitative Study of the Emotions of Personal Web Usage at Work

Abstract

This longitudinal field study uncovers the emotional meaning that defines personal Web usage (PWU) at work. To explore this emergent workplace phenomenon, the author conducted 67 semistructured interviews and collected archival documents at a local government municipality in the United States. After a phenomenological analysis of the informants’ emotion-laden narratives, the findings suggest that users defined their PWU as a guilty pleasure. For some informants, this type of emotional ambivalence was resolved and manifested into continued PWU devoid of guilt. For others, however, they continued to define their PWU behaviors as a push-and-pull battle between self-control and short-term benefit. Nevertheless, PWU persisted. Based on the themes analyzed in the data, two models are presented that depict the characteristics of the ambivalence and the overarching emotion-behavior process, respectively. The author concludes by discussing the contributions to existing research and directions for further inquiry.

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