Business Commons^™

Leadership And The Psychology Of Awareness: Three Theoretical Approaches To Information Security Management, Robert Holmberg, Mikael Sundstrom

Organization Management Journal

The authors argue that information security management (ISM) would benefit from studies that examine the social and psychological mechanisms that, when in evidence, generate employee awareness of information security (IS)-related issues. Properly instilled, IS awareness has the power to engender a proactive wariness beyond mechanical guidelines, however detailed. To study how awareness travels in complex organizations, the authors devise a framework to catch mechanisms grounded in psychological and sociological theories. To illustrate the framework, the authors then turn to an empirical study of a medium-sized company where they sound out managers for definitions of IS and ISM; for initiatives intended …