What 4,500+ People Can Tell You – Employees’ Attitudes Toward Organizational Password Policy Do Matter

Organizations establish policies on how employees should generate, maintain, and use passwords to authenticate and gain access to the organization’s information systems. This paper focuses on employees’ attitudes towards organizational password policies and examines the impacts on their work-related password activities that have security implications. We conducted a large-scale survey (4,573 respondents) to investigate the relationships between the organizational password policies and employees’ password behaviors. The key finding of this study is that employees’ attitudes toward the rationale behind cybersecurity policies are statistically significant with their password behaviors and experiences. Positive attitudes are related to more secure behaviors such as choosing stronger passwords and writing down passwords less often, less frustration with authentication procedures, and better understanding and respecting the significance to protect passwords and system security. We propose future research to promote positive employees’ attitudes toward organizational security policy that could facilitate the balance between security and usability.