The Closer You Get the More Aware You Become – A Case Study about Psychological Distance to Information Security Incidents
2017
Although the increasing number of information security incidents is causing great
concern to organizations, their effects on employees’ information security awareness
(ISA) are largely left unobserved. Thus, we conduct a qualitative exploratory study in a
large financial institution to explore how psychological distance to such incidents
influences employees’ ISA. Drawing from construal level theory and interview data
from 52 employees we develop a model proposing that ISA can arise due to a lowering
temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical distance towards security incidents. Further,
we propose that psychological distance may decrease with the presence of security
champions or may increase with employees’ responsibility shift to others. Besides
advancing the understanding of how employees construe security incidents, which
triggers ISA depending on the perceived distance or proximity, we also offer
organizations recommendations for security communication by proposing to
manipulate distance dimensions or to artificially recreate such events for raising ISA.
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