The Role of Social Status and Controllability on Employee Intent to Follow Organizational Information Security Requirements

Abstract

Using the theory of planned behavior, this paper investigates the relationship between an employee's social status, perceived controllability of co-workers' actions and individual self-efficacy in terms of predicting an employee's perceived behavioral control over and his/her intention to comply with an organization's information security policies. The reported findings in this paper from a survey of 182 employees of a large government organization suggest that decomposing perceived behavioral control into controllability and self-efficacy has more predictive power than using simpler proxies (i.e. self-efficacy alone) advocated in previous literature, and an employee's status in the organizational hierarchy has both a direct and a moderating effect on an employee's perceived behavioral control (but not on self-efficacy).