Toward a Model for Ethical Cybersecurity Leadership

Importance Of Ethics For Cybersecurity Leaders

Cybersecurity leaders create the standard for ethical behavior across entire organizations, industries, and continents. Since the 1990s, trust in businesses and the integrity of business people has declined (Barker & Comer, 2012). Ethical leadership and ethical decision making are important components of business instruction and recognized as such by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) (Baker & Comer, 2012). According to Gerde and Foster (2008) and Tomlinson (2009), students are taught how to identify ethical issues and how to make ethical decisions, but Dean and Beggs (2006) posit that teaching business ethics has a “negligible effect of their students’ behavior” (Baker & Comer, 2012).

Beyond business ethics, information security professionals are expected to uphold a standard of practice that promotes trust from the users and assurance that the information they maintain will be used for the comprehended intended purpose. According to Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, people learn from one another (Bandura, 1977), and in Kotter and Cohen (2002), one of the authors notes that after examining close to 100 cases, one finding was that most people “did not handle large-scale change well… mostly because they had little exposure to highly successful transformations.”