The Roles of Awareness, Sanctions, and Ethics in Software Compliance

Monitoring agencies continue to express concern over the use of unlicensed business software in organizations because of the ethical, legal, and financial implications of noncompliance. We constructed a multiple mediation model based on protection motivation theory in order to examine the threat and coping evaluation processes of employees regarding software license compliance. The responses of 138 organizational employees were used to empirically test the research model. The research model helps explain why compliance awareness influences compliance attitudes and behavior. The empirical findings indicate that compliance attitudes result from both consequence and coping appraisals with ethical beliefs having a stronger influence on compliance attitudes compared to the threat of sanctions. Furthermore, awareness drives the formation of threat and coping beliefs and directly influences attitude. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings that will enable organizations to meet the compliance challenge.