The Impact of Organizational Commitment on Insiders’ Motivation to Protect Organizational Information Assets

Abstract

Insiders may act to sustain and improve organizational information security, yet our knowledge of what motivates them to do so remains limited. For example, most extant research use portions of protection motivation theory (PMT) and have relied on isolated behaviors thus limiting the generalizability of findings to single artifacts rather than the global set of protective security behaviors. We thus investigate the motivations surrounding this larger behavioral set by assessing maladaptive rewards, response costs, and fear alongside traditional PMT components. We extend PMT by showing that: (1) security education, training, and awareness (SETA) efforts help form appraisals; (2) PMT’s applicability to organizational rather than personal contexts depends on insiders’ organizational commitment levels; and (3) response costs provide the link between PMT’s appraisals. Contributions include detailing how organizational commitment is the mechanism through which organizational security threats become personally relevant to insiders and how SETA efforts influence many PMT-based components.

Keywords: Protection-motivated behaviors, protection motivation theory, threat appraisal, coping appraisal, MIMIC model, security, organizational commitment, structural equation modeling