• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.11 no.11
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• pp.1-13
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• 2013

Every big online security breach seems to end in a big lecture. Thus, although a predominant weakness in properly securing information assets is the individual user within an organization, much of the focus of extant security research is on technical issues. The purpose of this study is to explain why insiders breach security policy by applying the moral disengagement theory. There are no consistent, widely accepted theories or theoretical frameworks in the literatures as to why insiders breach of information security, and therefore no clear, effective guidance on what to do to prevent employees from violating information security policy in organization. To do this, we theorize that moral disengagement may play a mediating role connecting stable individual differences to intention to breach security policy, because of some of the individual differences. We found that policy awareness and perceived punishment have a negatively significant effect on moral disengagement. However, negative affectivity has a positively significant influence on moral disengagement. Furthermore, moral disengagement has a positive effect on intention to breach security policy. Conclusions and implications are discussed.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.95-115
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• 2018

This study aims to examine organization members' intention to violate security policies based on the Person-Environment Fit Model. This study investigated the effect of the relationship between organizational security environment and the individual security value on the intention of organizational security policy violation. The security environments are classified into the organizational information security culture and peers' behavior of security compliance, while the personal values are classified into reconstructing the conduct, distorting the consequence, and devaluing the organization as presented in the moral disengagement theory. Based on the concept of the moral disengagement theory, we measured the individual security values as a second order factor. This study found that the information security culture had a statistically significant impact on devaluing the organization, but did not have as much impact on reconstructing the conduct and distorting the consequence. Peers' behavior of security compliance had a significant impact on reconstructing the conduct, distorting the consequence and devaluing the organization, all of which also had relevant impact on the organizational members' intention of security policy violation.This study measured a persons' perception on security policy breach by presenting scenarios of password sharing that is common in many organizations. This study is expected to make practical contributions, as it deals with challenges that many organizations are actually faced with.