Leadership styles and information security compliance behavior: The mediator effect of information security awareness

Leadership styles play an important role to enhance employee’s information security awareness and may lead to proper information security compliance behavior. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the indirect effect of leadership styles on user’s information security policies compliance behavior through the extent of information security awareness. Questionnaires survey were done among health professionals at government hospitals in Malaysia (N = 454). Statistical results confirm that transactional leadership style has a direct effect to all information security awareness factors, but the mediation effect on the relationship between transactional leadership and user’s information security policies compliance behavior through two intervening variables (severity awareness and benefit of security-countermeasure). Meanwhile, transformational leadership style has a direct effect on benefit of security-countermeasure and no mediation effect with the extent of all the intervening variables. The research findings found that severity awareness and benefit of security-countermeasure awareness were significant predictors of information security policies compliance behavior while susceptibility awareness and perceived barrier were insignificant. Our findings were proven to be beneficial to fellow researchers and management of the organization, especially related to the medical sectors in improving current standards of information security awareness in hospitals.