Why and How Do Employees Break and Bend Confidential Information Protection Rules?

Abstract

Organizations cannot function effectively if their employees do not follow organizational rules and policies. In this paper, we explore why and how employees in two high-tech organizations often broke or bent rules designed to protect their employers' confidential information (CI). The CI protection rules sometimes imposed requirements that disrupted employees' work, forcing employees to choose between CI rule compliance and doing their work effectively and efficiently. Employees in these situations often broke the rules or bent them in ways that enabled employees to meet some of the rules' requirements, while also satisfying other expectations that they faced. We discuss implications of our findings for practice and for future organizational scholarship on rule following.

Workload, Risks, and Goal Framing as Antecedents of Shortcut Behaviors

“…Consequently, employees sometimes take shortcuts to manage demands on their time (Hannah and Robertson 2015;Parks et al 2010;Sekerka and Zolin 2007). We define shortcut behaviors as the use of methods or means for completing a task that require less time than typical or standard procedures.…”

HR-related Knowledge Protection and Innovation Performance: The Moderating Effect of Trust

“…Compared with hard HR mechanisms, a couple of notions can be made. First, restrictive mechanisms are not likely to lose their protective strength even if employees would feel distrusted: in case of hard HR mechanisms, they could simply breach the contracts and cause problems by abusing the knowledge that they have accessed—especially if sanctions are not enough to prevent such activities in practice (Bulgurcu et al ., ; Hannah and Robertson, ). Restrictions secure the knowledge base in any case as the knowledge is not available to be mistreated by disappointed employees.…”

“…Similarly, the current research identifies restrictive HR mechanisms as benefitting from an atmosphere of high organizational trust, but if those mechanisms start to limit knowledge exchange too much, the benefits might be lost (Bulgurcu et al ., ). In case of these mechanisms that inherently emphasize control over commitment, justification and reasoning is of high importance to allow preservation of commitment (Hannah and Robertson, ). Finally, if the firm were to choose only soft mechanisms, it might unintentionally enable opportunism in case organizational trust declines notably for some reason.…”

“…The ultimate effects of HR mechanisms utilized at firm level may depend on different contingency factors. For example, employees generally are more likely to accept knowledge protection rules when their own values are congruent with the employers' values (Tyler and Blader, ) and when the guidelines set by the employer are not contradicting their values or obstructing the work (Bulgurcu et al ., ; Hannah and Robertson, ). Organizational trust that may reflect these aspects can, subsequently, be considered as a relevant contingency factor.…”

“…It has also been identified as a critical factor in leadership (Tyler, ) and performance (Barney and Hansen, ). In line with this, trust may contribute to the compliance towards rules (Hannah and Robertson, ), like level of knowledge sharing and innovation performance. In addition, trust is relevant for job satisfaction (Shockley‐Zalabak et al ., ), organizational commitment (Dirks and Ferrin, ; Aryee et al ., ; Bijlsma and Koopman, ) and employee loyalty (Costigan et al ., ).…”