Information Security Policies (ISPs) have been established in many organizations of marine engineering to safeguard their information systems
[1],
[2],
[3],
[4]. When interacting with these systems, the marine engineering employees are required to comply with the specific rules and responsibilities formulated by the marine ISPs
[5],
[6],
[7],
[8]. The marine ISPs are only effective to the extent that employees comply with them
[7]. In practice, many employees often prefer to comply with the marine ISPs with insufficient effort, but to pay attention almost exclusively to their day-to-day routine jobs, after they are delegated by the marine engineering employer to carry out the two different tasks in the same time period [
9,
10]. Previous investigations
[11],
[12],
[13],
[14],
[15],
[16],
[17],
[18],
[19] have shown that employee's failure to comply with the marine ISPs may impair not only the asset, reputation and competitiveness of the organization, but also the performance of her routine job [
9,
10,
20]. A number of factors, such as information security awareness, organizational culture and punishment, are known to influence employee's intentional compliance behaviors [
7,
14,
16,
17,
21]. However, the selection of the ISPs compliance effort levels is rarely discussed in a multi-task context of marine engineering in the previous studies. In most cases, the marine ISPs compliance task is bound with the employee's routine job because the completing of her routine job needs to use the marine information systems. Task dissonance, i.e., the discord arising in employee's cognition of conflicting utilities between her routine job and marine ISPs compliance, may appear
[22]. For instance, sending an encrypted e-mail according to the specific marine information security rules requires more steps than sending a regular e-mail. The additional complication of sending the encrypted e-mail is considered by the employee as extra work load without any payoffs. The employee would perceive that the marine ISPs compliance task interferes with her routine job [
20,
23]. Although the marine engineering employer expects that the routine job and the marine ISPs compliance task are both performed by the employee with high efforts, the latter is often ignored. Therefore, motivating a marine engineering employee to allocate appropriately her efforts between the two tasks appears to be crucial for eliminating the security threats from the marine ISPs non-compliance and improving her routine job performance.