The Influence of Organizational Information Security Culture on Information Security Decision Making

Abstract

In this study three aspects of information security decision making-namely, knowledge of policies and procedures, attitude towards policies and procedures, and self-reported behavior-were examined in conjunction with the organizational factors that may increase human-based cyber vulnerabilities. The results of a survey of 500 Australian employees revealed a significant, positive relationship between information security decision making and organizational information security culture. This suggests that improving the security culture of an organization will positively influence the behavior of employees, which in turn should also improve compliance with security policies. This means that risk to an organization's information systems and data will be mitigated. The complexity associated with implementing effective rewards and punishments are discussed, along with suggestions for further research to adequately understand the many factors that influence information security decision making.

A Reliable Measure of Information Security Awareness and the Identification of Bias in Responses

“…For example, Parsons et al (2015) used the HAIS-Q to explore the relationship between information security and organisational security culture, and reported high Cronbach's alphas of above .80. Most recently, McCormac et al (2017) evaluated the extent to which individual differences (e.g., personality, age, gender) may be associated with HAIS-Q scores, and also reported consistently high Cronbach's alpha scores.…”

Multicriteria analysis of the compliance for the improvement of information security

“…Thanks to these requirements, information security reduces the impact or the probability of security threats and weaknesses at an acceptable level for the organization (Singh & Margam, 2018). Therefore, information security practices related to security technology adoption and to the user behavior (Bulgurcu, Cavusoglu, & Benbasat, 2010;Sêmola, 2014;Parsons et al, 2015;Safa et al, 2015) are used so that the information security goals (Dhillon & Backhouse, 2000;Bulgurcu, Cavusoglu, & Benbasat, 2010;Sêmola, 2014;Uddin & Preston, 2015) can be addressed.…”

Introduction to Special Issue of the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making Special Issue Focus

“…We are very pleased to present three papers that are primarily focused on what influences the decisions of the latter group. The Parsons et al (2015) paper provides insight into how an organization’s information security culture can affect the security decisions made by an individual worker’s compliance with security policy and ultimately the organization’s risk to cyber attack. Nehmadi and Meyer’s (2015) paper addresses the factors that contribute to whether people choose to use authentication methods such as strong passwords to increase the security of their computing activities or whether they prefer to bypass authentication in favor of ease and efficiency.…”