Towards Understanding User Behavioral Intentions to Use IT Security: Examining the Impact of IT Security Psychological Climate and Individual Beliefs

The advent of technologies such as the Internet, intranets, EDI and extranets moves IT from the locked backroom into offices and homes globally, often placing internal users in an integral role for information security. Consequently, there is a growing need to better understand what influences user behavior for comprehensive IT security development. A complementary view to understanding the influences of user behavior is the organizational context within which users act. Investigating both influences of user behavior and organizational context simultaneously is proposed to best answer the recent calls to use a socio-organizational approach in IT security research. Two prominent bodies of research, the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) used to frame the influences of user behavior and the organizational behavioral contextual concept of psychological climate, are integrated to develop a multidimensional facet-specific IT security model.