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Security compliance and work-issued mobile devices: Out of sight, out of mind?

October 2023
Information Systems and e-Business Management 21(8)

Authors:

For security, economic, and efficiency reasons, many businesses supply mobile devices to employees to use both in the workplace and remotely, accompanied by policies governing their appropriate use. Extant research has shown that work-issued mobile devices can disrupt employees’ perceptions of work-life balance (WLB) and, indeed, WLB can impact employees’ job satisfaction and performance. The global COVID-19 pandemic meant that more employees than usual performed their work remotely, but this situation may have not fit the preferred WLB for some. Did this encroachment mean that appropriate use policies were forgotten? We conducted two rounds of surveys, one pre-pandemic and the other mid-pandemic, to determine whether those workplace changes led some employees astray. In other words, which type of WLB perceptions are more likely to lead to policy violations and how does the WLB mismatch cause deviant behaviors before and during the pandemic? The results from cluster analysis and the comparison between the pre and mid-pandemic suggest that policy violators were present in both time periods, but before the pandemic violators were in more compartmentalized work settings and mid-pandemic violators dominated all work settings.

WLB perspectives and the relative importance of management strategies (adopted from Sarker et al. 2012)

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Information Systems and e-Business Management (2023) 21:913–945

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-023-00654-y

1 3

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Security compliance andwork‑issued mobile devices: Out

ofsight, outofmind?

KentMarett1 · ShanXiao2· SuminKim1

Received: 28 July 2022 / Revised: 26 June 2023 / Accepted: 20 September 2023 /

Published online: 16 October 2023

Abstract

For security, economic, and eﬃciency reasons, many businesses supply mobile

devices to employees to use both in the workplace and remotely, accompanied by

policies governing their appropriate use. Extant research has shown that work-issued

mobile devices can disrupt employees’ perceptions of work-life balance (WLB) and,

indeed, WLB can impact employees’ job satisfaction and performance. The global

COVID-19 pandemic meant that more employees than usual performed their work

remotely, but this situation may have not ﬁt the preferred WLB for some. Did this

encroachment mean that appropriate use policies were forgotten? We conducted

two rounds of surveys, one pre-pandemic and the other mid-pandemic, to determine

whether those workplace changes led some employees astray. In other words, which

type of WLB perceptions are more likely to lead to policy violations and how does

the WLB mismatch cause deviant behaviors before and during the pandemic? The

results from cluster analysis and the comparison between the pre and mid-pandemic

suggest that policy violators were present in both time periods, but before the pan-

demic violators were in more compartmentalized work settings and mid-pandemic

violators dominated all work settings.

Keywords Mobile devices· Information security· Work-life balance· COVID-19

* Kent Marett

kmarett@business.msstate.edu

Shan Xiao

xiao@gonzaga.edu

Sumin Kim

sk2013@msstate.edu

1 Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA

2 Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA

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