Information security behavior and information security policy compliance: a systematic literature review for identifying the transformation process from noncompliance to compliance

A grave concern to an organization’s information security is employees’ behavior when they do not value information security policy compliance (ISPC). Most ISPC studies evaluate compliance and noncompliance behaviors separately. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the factors that transform the employees’ behavior from noncompliance to compliance. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR), highlighting the studies done concerning information security behavior (ISB) towards ISPC in multiple settings: research frameworks, research designs, and research methodologies over the last decade. We found that ISPC research focused more on compliance behaviors than noncompliance behaviors. Value conflicts, security-related stress, and neutralization, among many other factors, provided significant evidence towards noncompliance. At the same time, internal/external and protection motivations proved positively significant towards compliance behaviors. Employees perceive internal and external motivations from their social circle, management behaviors, and organizational culture to adopt security-aware behaviors. Deterrence techniques, management behaviors, culture, and information security awareness play a vital role in transforming employees’ noncompliance into compliance behaviors. This SLR’s motivation is to synthesize the literature on ISPC and ISB, identifying the behavioral transformation process from noncompliance to compliance. This SLR contributes to information system security literature by providing a behavior transformation process model based on the existing ISPC literature.

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).