Assessing self-justification as an antecedent of noncompliance with information security policies

This paper aims to extend our knowledge about employees’ noncompliance with Information Security Policies (ISPs), focusing on employees’ self-justification as a result of escalation of commitment that may trigger noncompliance behaviour. Escalation presents a situation when employees must decide whether to persist or withdraw from nonperforming tasks at work. Drawing on self-justification theory and prospect theory, our model presents two escalation factors in explaining employee’s willingness to engage in noncompliance behaviour with ISPs: self-justification and risk perceptions. We also propose that perceived benefits of noncompliance and perceived costs of compliance, at the intersection of cognitive and emotional driven acts influence self-justification. The model is tested based on 376 respondents from banking industry. The results show that while self-justification has a significant impact on willingness, risk perceptions do not moderate their relation. We suggest that future research should explore the roles of self-justification in noncompliance to a greater extent.<p></p>