Employees as a Source of Security Issues in Times of Change and Stress : A Longitudinal Examination of Employees’ Security Violations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Whether malicious or not, employees’ actions can have significant and detrimental outcomes for their organizations. Such is the case in organizational cybersecurity, as many issues stem from trusted individuals who have access to sensitive data, information, and systems. We explore the phenomenon of employees’ security violations in the context of pandemic-induced stressors among employees working from home (WFH) during a 10-day period of the COVID-19 pandemic. By assessing several categories of stressors and violation behaviors among 333 WFH employees daily for two work weeks, we discovered several stressors that significantly explained security violations during the pandemic. Within-person deviations in competing demands due to security emerged as a significant predictor of a subsequent increase in violations, and the effect of privacy invasion/monitoring concerns was marginally significant. We also found evidence that family-to-work conflict resulted in higher levels of daily security violations, but work-to-family conflict failed to exhibit any significant relationship with our outcome of interest. Unexpectedly, moderator analyses indicate that employees’ sharing of digital devices with others in the WFH environment might limit rather than exacerbate the effects of daily stressors on security violations. Thus, technology- and non-technology-related factors are associated with employees’ decisions to violate their organizations’ security expectations in a WFH environment. Our findings provide an expanded view of how stressors relate to employees’ security violations and what organizations can do to limit them in times of crises.

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023