Investigation of information security policy violations among oil and gas employees: A security-related stress and avoidance coping perspective

Abstract

Information security is one of the most crucial considerations in digitising Oil and Gas (O&G) organisations. For ensuring information security policy compliance, O&G organisations enforce heavy security requirements. The purpose of this article is to assess how O&G employees cope with stressful information security tasks and how security-related stress (SRS) is related to information security policy violations among O&G employees in developing countries. Based on the coping theory, this article develops a theoretical framework to examine O&G employees’ intention to violate information security policies. The framework is tested using a survey of 270 managers/executives from 150 Malaysian O&G organisations. The results indicated that O&G employees perceive security requirements as stressful to follow and adopt avoidance coping strategies that lead them to violate organisational information security policies. For practitioners, the study findings demonstrate the prevalence of technostress in O&G organisations and suggest alternative mechanisms to address the stressful effects of information security requirements. This article contributes to the information system security literature by testing procrastination and psychological detachment with SRS in the context of developing countries' O&G organisations’ employees and provides an understanding of how O&G employees adopt avoidance coping.