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Introduction
Research has shown how managers have great concerns regarding their employees' personal activities during working hours, and inclusively try to understand why these individuals do not focus only on their professional responsibilities (Epstein and Kalleberg, 2004; Sexton, 2005). What's more, current studies (e.g. Eddy et al. , 2010) have inclusively designated three different concepts for behavior that individuals perform at work that is not directly related to their daily professional tasks. Specifically, this behavior is denoted as "non-work related activities," "workplace deviance" or "presenteeism." Other designations in the literature for this type of behavior include "time wasters" (Haynes, 2004) and "banana time" (Roy, 1959), which pertain to situations where employees develop several time-based rituals (e.g. lunch time, coffee time, Coke time, window time, break time, etc.). According to Haynes (2004), there are two main types for time wasters, namely, the self-generated time wasters and the environmental contextual time wasters. The author presents example behaviors of self-generated time wasters, such as disorganization, procrastination and an inability to say "no." As for the environmental contextual time wasters, examples are pointed out as family visits, phone calls, e-mails, waiting times and meetings.
The social construction of the ritual-time norms that are associated with all of the personal activities developed at work by employees are yet to be studied in the literature (Ancona et al. , 2001). Furthermore, although some studies have contemplated time in organizations (see, e.g. the Academy of Management Review , Tushman, 2001), there are little empirical contributions to the literature on human resource management and specifically regarding personal activities performed at work. One of the biggest concerns for managers is to know whether their subordinates are aware of how much time they devote to these activities (Epstein and Kalleberg, 2004; Sexton, 2005). Hence, we aim to measure the time employees spend on personal activities at work in an attempt to understand whether employees are able to accurately keep track of the time they spend on personal activities performed at work. Specifically, we intend to compare the registered objective time and perceived time spent on personal activities developed at work with a longitudinal ethnographic methodology. This approach is a methodological advance in understanding the perceived time spent on activities that are not directly related...