Why and How Do Employees Break and Bend Confidential Information Protection Rules?

Organizations cannot function effectively if their employees do not follow organizational rules and policies. In this paper, we explore why and how employees in two high-tech organizations often broke or bent rules designed to protect their employers' confidential information (CI). The CI protection rules sometimes imposed requirements that disrupted employees' work, forcing employees to choose between CI rule compliance and doing their work effectively and efficiently. Employees in these situations often broke the rules or bent them in ways that enabled employees to meet some of the rules' requirements, while also satisfying other expectations that they faced. We discuss implications of our findings for practice and for future organizational scholarship on rule following.