Social Groupings and Information Security Obedience Within Organizations

Individuals’ compliance with information security policies is important for the overall security of organizations. It has been suggested that obedience cultures exist in organizations and that social processes and structures play a role for the compliance intentions and compliance behavior of individuals. This paper investigates if individuals’ compliance intention is more homogenous within social groups in the workplace than they are within the workplace overall workplace and the effect these groups have are in line with the theory of planned behavior. The results show that a considerable portion of variance in information security policy compliance intentions is explained by the respondents’ organizational department (15%), professional knowledge area (17%), and the same lunch room (18%). While sizeable and significant effects can be found on intentions the effects on attitudes, norm and perceived behavior control are less clear. The only statistically significant (p<0.05) effect is from department on attitudes and perceived norm, each with 6% explained variance. This suggests that the theory of planned behavior fails to account for factors tied to these types of social groups.