Threat or coping appraisal: determinants of SMB executives’ decision to adopt anti-malware software

Abstract

This study presents an empirical investigation of factors affecting small- and medium-sized business (SMB) executives’ decision to adopt anti-malware software for their organizations. A research model was developed by adopting and expanding the protection motivation theory from health psychology, which has successfully been used to investigate the effect of threat and coping appraisal on protective actions. A questionnaire-based field survey with 239 U.S. SMB executives was conducted, and the data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS). This study demonstrates that threat and coping appraisal successfully predict SMB executives’ anti-malware software adoption intention, leading to SMB adoption. In addition, considerable variance in adoption intention and actual SMB adoption is addressed by social influence from key stakeholders and situation-specific variables, such as IT budget and vendor support. Further, the generalizability of the model was tested using industry type and IS expertise. The adoption intention of IS experts and IT intensive industries was mainly affected by threat appraisal and social influence, while that of non-IS experts and non-IT intensive industries was significantly influenced by coping appraisal and IT budget. Vendor support was a key facilitator of the anti-malware adoption for IS experts and IT intensive industry groups, while IT budget was for non-IS expert and non-IT intensive industry groups. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• protection motivation
• anti-malware
• technology acceptance
• partial least squares

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge grant support from Webroot Inc.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Younghwa Lee

About the authors

Younghwa Lee is an Assistant Professor of information systems in the University of Kansas School of Business, Lawrence, KS, USA. He received his Ph.D. from University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA, in 2005. His research interest is in technology acceptance, website usability, and IT ethics and security. He is an ICIS 2003 Doctoral Consortium fellow. He has published in Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, among others.

Kai R Larsen

Kai R. Larsen is an Associate Professor of information systems in the University of Colorado at Boulder, Leeds School of Business, Boulder, CO, U.S.A. His research interests center around interdisciplinary approaches to information systems implementation, inter-organizational networks, and development and application of the automatic text analysis in IS research. He has published in Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Sociological Methodology, and Communications of the ACM among others.