The Impact of Culture on Information Security: Exploring the Tension of Flexibility and Control

There is an underlying cultural tension in organizations between flexibility provided by digital technologies and control desired for information security. This study seeks to understand information security and culture by exploring the implications of the co-existence of incongruent values of flexibility and control that are necessary for a complex business environment. While organizations value the flexibility provided by information technologies in this complex business environment, the flexibility and autonomy could potentially generate information security weakness by introducing more points of vulnerability into the cybersecurity ecosystem. To understand this tension of the co-existence of these incongruent cultures we take the perspective of culture as a toolkit, the lens of the Competing Value Framework, and the saliency associated with frames to study how organizations can utilize culture to safeguard against attacks, while at the same time utilize and introduce digital technologies to embrace flexibility and address the complexity in the business environment