Understanding Employees' ISP Compliance from The Perspective of Emotion-Focused Coping Approaches

Various theories from criminology and psychology have been utilized to understand employees' information security policy (ISP) compliance. However, the emotional perspective is less frequently studied. Drawing upon the perspective of emotion-focused coping (EFC), especially in forms of inward and outward EFC strategies, we explain people's ISP compliance behaviors through their coping mechanisms on negative emotional reactions to security-related stress (SRS). Drawing upon D'Arcy and Teh (2019) and Liang et al. (2019), we propose that inward EFC is helpful to mitigate the SRS-aroused fatigue while outward EFC is helpful to mitigate the SRS-aroused frustration, and that outward EFC amplifies ISP compliance intention whereas inward EFC reduces ISP compliance. This study highlights that other than the cognitive rationalization (i.e., inward EFC), direct emotion mitigating mechanism (i.e., outward EFC) is another driving force when people cope with SRS. It is important to incorporate both inward and outward EFC strategies into employee stress management.