The Effect of Organization-Based Self-Esteem and Deindividuation in Protecting Personal Information Privacy

In this research we apply the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to study decisions related to information privacy protection. A TPB-based model was proposed to investigate whether organization-based self-esteem and perceived deindividuation can be employed to measure the strength of the perceived behavioral control construct. In addition, we examined if the addition of a causal path linking subjective norms to attitudes and another causal path linking organization-based self-esteem to subjective norms enhanced our research model's predicting power. Our study shows that information systems (IS) professionals' intentions to protect personal information privacy are influenced by their attitudes, subjective norms, perceived deindividuation, and organization-based self-esteem. It further shows that attitudes are influenced by subjective norms, which, in turn, are influenced by organization-based self-esteem.