Measuring the security culture in organizations: a systematic overview of existing tools

Marlies Sas*, Wim Hardyns, Karolien van Nunen, Genserik Reniers, Koen Ponnet

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)
418 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

There has been an increase in research into the security culture in organizations in recent years. This growing interest has been accompanied by the development of tools to measure the level of security culture in order to identify potential threats and formulate solutions. This article provides a systematic overview of the existing tools. A total of 16 are identified, of which six are studied in detail. This exploration reveals that there is no validated and widely accepted tool that can be used in different sectors and organizations. The majority of the tools reviewed use only a quantitative method; however, security culture includes very different domains and therefore a mixed-method approach should be used. In contrast to security culture, instruments for measuring safety culture are widely available, and with many similarities between these two domains it is possible that well-established tools for measuring safety culture could be adapted to a security environment.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)340-357
Number of pages18
JournalSecurity Journal
Volume34
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Measuring instruments
  • Organizational culture
  • Organizations
  • Security culture
  • Systematic overview

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