Security compliance and work-issued mobile devices: Out of sight, out of mind?

For security, economic, and efficiency reasons, many businesses supply mobile devices to employees to use both in the workplace and remotely, accompanied by policies governing their appropriate use. Extant research has shown that work-issued mobile devices can disrupt employees’ perceptions of work-life balance (WLB) and, indeed, WLB can impact employees’ job satisfaction and performance. The global COVID-19 pandemic meant that more employees than usual performed their work remotely, but this situation may have not fit the preferred WLB for some. Did this encroachment mean that appropriate use policies were forgotten? We conducted two rounds of surveys, one pre-pandemic and the other mid-pandemic, to determine whether those workplace changes led some employees astray. In other words, which type of WLB perceptions are more likely to lead to policy violations and how does the WLB mismatch cause deviant behaviors before and during the pandemic? The results from cluster analysis and the comparison between the pre and mid-pandemic suggest that policy violators were present in both time periods, but before the pandemic violators were in more compartmentalized work settings and mid-pandemic violators dominated all work settings.