How to enhance antiphishing training performance? The roles of performance facilitators and message-specific coping responses

Phishing has become one of the most pervasive security threats in today’s world. Despite much research on antiphishing behavior, little attention has been paid to how performance facilitators and individuals’ phishing message-specific coping responses operate jointly to determine antiphishing training performance in the context of this training. Based on goal-setting theory and coping responses, this study was designed to develop and test a model of antiphishing training performance by focusing on performance facilitators (e.g., incentive structures, feedback, time constraints) and their interactions with message-specific coping responses (e.g., task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping, avoidance-oriented coping). To empirically test the proposed model, we performed three experiments on 692 subjects in the United States. Our results suggest that performance facilitators and message-specific coping responses are important predictors in understanding antiphishing training performance.