Unravel the Black Box between Fear and Security Coping Behavior: The Role of Learning from Failure
Chengqi Guo · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2020
Leadership and organizational learning theorists have argued that psychological safety is associated with learning from failures at all three levels - individual, group, and organization. Meanwhile, behavioral information systems (IS) security researchers have produced various frameworks to explain individuals' psychological and behavioral responses to security threats and risks. Their findings, however, do not explain how learning from failure - a critical factor for improvements at multiple levels - unfolds in the IS security paradigm where fear plays a key role in exerting impacts on individuals' emotional state and subsequent behavioral manifestations. We propose that a cross-paradigmatic examination of the theoretical underpinnings of psychological safety, fear, leadership roles, and threat-response appraisal may benefit our academic society, who continuously seeks innovative ways to elucidate befuddling, sometimes conflicting, security-based behaviors. We theorize how the presence of moderate fear stimuli, in conjunction with psychological safety, may augment learning performance and thus positively affect the security coping intention and behavior of information workers. We also initiated a discussion of moving beyond the dichotomy of what we learn better from - success vs. failure, by suggesting that an organic permutation of learning from success and failure experiences, if carefully assessed and calibrated, appears to serve our best interests.