Leveraging fairness and reactance theories to deter reactive computer abuse following enhanced organisational information security policies: an empirical study of the influence of counterfactual reasoning and organisational trust
Authors: Lowry, Paul Benjamin; Posey, Clay; Bennett, Rebecca (Becky) J.; Roberts, Tom L.
Journal: Information Systems Journal (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/isj.12063
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Research shows that organisational efforts to protect their information assets from employee security threats do not always reach their full potential and may actually encourage the behaviours they attempt to thwart, such as reactive computer abuse (CA). To better understand this dilemma, we use fairness theory (FT) and reactance theory (RT) to explain why employees may blame organisations for and retaliate against enhanced information security policies (ISPs). We tested our model with 553 working professionals and found support for most of it. Our results show that organisational trust can decrease reactive CA. FT suggests that explanation adequacy (EA) is an important factor that builds trust after an event. Our results also suggest that trust both fully mediates the relationship between EA and CA and partially mediates the relationship between perceived freedom restrictions related to enhanced ISPs and reactive CA. EA also had a strong negative relationship with freedom restrictions. Moreover, organisational security education, training and awareness (SETA) initiatives decreased the perceptions of external control and freedom restriction…