The moderating effect of abusive supervision on information security policy compliance: Evidence from the hospitality industry

Author Identifier

Xuequn Wang

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1557-8265

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Computers & Security

Volume

111

Publisher

Elsevier

School

School of Business and Law

RAS ID

36909

Funders

National Natural Science Foundation of China Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China

Comments

Xu, J., Wang, X., & Yan, L. (2021). The moderating effect of abusive supervision on information security policy compliance: Evidence from the hospitality industry. Computers & Security, 111, article 102455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2021.102455

Abstract

Organizations have recognized the importance of information security and have developed information security policies for their employees. Deterrence is often used to enhance employees’ compliance intention. However, the literature reports mixed results for the effects of deterrence, and we argue that those conflicting findings can be due to different managerial contexts across organizations. To understand how managerial factors influence the effects of deterrence, our study focused on abusive supervision and examined how abusive supervision moderated the relationship between deterrence perception and employee’ intention to comply with information security policies. Two rounds of surveys were conducted to collect data from Chinese hotel employees. The results show that abusive supervision could not enhance the effect of perceived severity and certainty of deterrence, when compliance intention from the second-round survey was used for hypotheses testing. Our study contributes to the literature by taking the first step toward explaining the inconsistent results in the literature on deterrence. Our study also provides important strategic guidelines informing managers that abusive supervision should not be used to enhance employees’ compliance with information security policies.

DOI

10.1016/j.cose.2021.102455

Access Rights

subscription content

Share

 
COinS