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

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).