Understanding Information Security Compliance - Why Goal Setting and Rewards Might be a Bad Idea

Since organizational information security policies can only improve security if employees comply with them, understanding the factors that affect employee security compliance is crucial for strengthening information security. Based on a survey with 200 German employees, we find that reward for production goal achievement negatively impacts security compliance. Whereas a distinct error aversion culture also seems to impair security compliance, the results provide no evidence for an impact of error management culture, affective commitment towards the organization, security policy information quality or quality of the goal setting process. Furthermore, the intention to comply with security policies turns out to be a bad predictor for actual security compliance. We therefore suggest future studies to measure actual behavior instead of behavioral intention.