Cyberloafing Under Toxic Leadership: A Job Demands–Resources Account of Burnout and Perceived Psychosocial Safety Climate

Cyberloafing is increasingly recognised as a common yet motivationally complex workplace behaviour. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) framework, this study examined whether toxic leadership is associated with cyberloafing through burnout syndromes and whether individual-level perceived psychosocial safety climate (PSC) buffers this health-impairment process. Using a cross-sectional online survey design, data were collected from 199 working adults across multiple industries, primarily from South Asia. A first stage moderated parallel mediation model was tested using Hayes’s PROCESS v5.0 Model 7 with 5000 bootstrap resamples. Toxic leadership was positively associated with all four burnout subdimensions, and significant indirect effects on cyberloafing emerged via exhaustion, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment, whereas mental distance did not mediate the relationship. Individual-level perceived PSC did not significantly buffer the links between toxic leadership and burnout. Overall, the findings suggest that, in toxic supervisory contexts, cyberloafing may be better understood as a maladaptive coping response to burnout-related impairment than as a simple retaliatory behaviour. These results extend leadership and burnout research by locating toxic leadership within the JD-R health-impairment pathway and by highlighting the limited protective role of perceived PSC when the source of harm is the immediate supervisor. Practical implications support an integrated intervention strategy.