Security profiling of airport employees: Complying with the rules

Recent evidence has shown that airport security decisions frequently fail to follow rules and procedures. Investigating this phenomenon through an analysis of data garnered from ethnographic and field surveys of European airports suggests that propensity to bend or ignore the rules can be associated with three distinct airport employee types, namely the ‘adaptive’, ‘social interactive’ and ‘compliant bureaucratic’. Each employee security profile is characterised in terms of the degree of rule compliance. ‘Adaptive’ employees are likely to bend rules. ‘Social interactive’ rely primarily on group decision making, and ‘compliant bureaucratic’ are allied with the administrative and security regulations. These findings should alert security officials to the possibility of leveraging such employee profiles in terms of human resource recruitment and physical distribution within the airport organisation to take advantage of specific requirements in the operation of the airport.