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Culture Corrupts! A Qualitative Study of Organizational Culture in Corrupt Organizations

Journal of Business Ethics volume 120, pages 291–311 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

Although theory refers to organizational culture as an important variable in corrupt organizations, only little empirical research has addressed the characteristics of a corrupt organizational culture. Besides some characteristics that go hand in hand with unethical behavior and other features of corrupt organizations, we are still not able to describe a corrupt organizational culture in terms of its underlying assumptions, values, and norms. With a qualitative approach, we studied similarities of organizational culture across different corrupt organizations. In this study, we performed content analysis on interviews of 14 independent experts about their experience with corrupt organizations. With this approach, we gained insights about different corrupt organizations spanning different branches (e.g., government, foreign trade, pharmacy, sports, building industry). We found that corrupt organizations perceive themselves to fight in a war, which leads to their taken-for-granted assumption that “the end justifies the means”. This assumption inspires many values and norms of the organizational culture. An important value in a corrupt organization is “security”, and an important norm is punishment of deviant (i.e., non-corrupt) behavior. Furthermore, managers and employees differ in their perception of organizational culture. While the management endorses values, such as success, results, and performance, and implements these values in their norms of goal setting, employees make use of rationalization strategies and endorse values of security and team spirit.

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Notes

  1. We translated all quotations (except our English interview) into the English language. Furthermore, to ensure anonymity, we removed all names of organizations.

  2. We translated all interview questions into English.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Psychologie, Abteilung Wirtschaftspsychologie, Engelberger Straße 41, 79085, Freiburg, Germany

    Jamie-Lee Campbell & Anja S. Göritz

  2. Psychologisches Institut Arbeits-, Betriebs- und Organisationspsychologie, Roentgenring 10, 97070, Wuerzburg, Germany

    Jamie-Lee Campbell

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  1. Jamie-Lee Campbell
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Correspondence to Jamie-Lee Campbell.

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Campbell, JL., Göritz, A.S. Culture Corrupts! A Qualitative Study of Organizational Culture in Corrupt Organizations. J Bus Ethics 120, 291–311 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1665-7

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Keywords

  • Corruption
  • Corrupt organization
  • Employee and manager values, norms, underlying assumptions
  • Organizational culture