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Establishing the Normative Standards that Determine Deviance in Organizational Corruption: Is Corruption Within Organizations Antisocial or Unethical?

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Abstract

Despite universal agreement that corruption is norm-deviant, the criteria required to ascertain deviance remain elusive. The problem is even more pronounced for organizational corruption, not least because the construct remains somewhat ambiguous and is often conflated with proximate management constructs like antisocial or unethical organizational behavior. In this article, I identify the suitable criteria for the determination of deviance in organizational corruption and determine whether it is, indeed, antisocial or unethical. In order to minimize ambiguity, I first limit the scope of organizational corruption to corruption within, rather than by, organizations, which is most conceptually challenging insofar as the aforementioned questions are concerned. I then conclude that organizational corruption should be specified solely with respect to the focal organization’s normative framework; it is anti-organizational rather than antisocial. Higher level normative prescriptions that arise from the organization’s embedding within its social context remain relevant, but only insofar as they are incorporated within the organization’s normative framework. Moreover, I argue that organizational corruption is not necessarily unethical, since the moral evaluation of an organizational act is, in principle, distinct from the determination of its deviance to organizational norms.

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Notes

  1. As I explicate later, I limit the scope of this paper to corruption within organizations rather than corruption by organizations. Consequently, I refer only to the table’s left column that involves corruption within organizations.

  2. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for proposing the use of such a discussion framework diagram.

  3. I emphasize the term direct in the text since even when organizations are perpetrators of corruption they may end up being their own victims, indirectly. Arthur Andersen, for example, eventually shut down because of its corrupt practices, as did Enron.

  4. Corruption within organizations is a broad term that encompasses Pinto et al.’s (2008) Organization of Corrupt Individuals since, in their case, individual corruption has crossed a threshold and has become endemic, similar to Aguilera and Vadera’s (2008) schematic corruption. Corruption within organizations, however, also includes individual corrupt acts that remain isolated.

  5. As Ashforth et al. note: “corruption is both a state and a process” (2008, p. 671, emphasis in original). The former refers to acts that involve abuse of one’s power, while the latter refers to the “viruslike infection” (p. 671) of the organization whose culture becomes corrupt. Following this observation, I view corruption within and by organizations as two states that are connected by the process of corrupting, referred to the above.

  6. In this article, I use the term power in a general form in order to encapsulate other relevant terms like authority, position, office, or collective responsibility that are often utilized in the corruption literature. That does not mean that all these terms are identical, but their relation extends beyond the scope of this article. Moreover, the term personal gain includes not only pecuniary, but also intangible benefits that extend not only to the corrupt actor but other third parties, termed beneficiaries in the literature (e.g., Philp, 1997). This, too, is an aspect of organizational corruption that is worthy of more detailed investigation.

  7. In contrast, the perpetrator in corruption by organizations, which, as Lange (2008) suggests, is better viewed as a societal problem, is the organization. Consequently, corruption by organizations lies primarily at the interface of the organizational and societal levels.

  8. Since corrupt acts may be committed by multiple perpetrators in unison, it would be more precise to consider the group level as well, which lies between the individual and the organizational level. However, this additional complication adds little to my present thesis and so I discount it. For the purposes of this paper, one may simply consider the group in unison as a single “individual” or replace the term “individual level” with the term “group level” whenever the act under scrutiny has been committed by a group rather than an individual, without loss of generality or rigor.

  9. The deviance and, mostly, the betrayal that corruption entails explain its negativity which, I believe, is shared by all. However, negativity in general does not necessarily imply negativity in a moral or any other specific type of evaluation. The general negativity of a corrupt act is not eradicated if it so happens that a particular evaluation based on very specific criteria may not turn out negative. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for inspiring this subtle clarification.

  10. I, further, suggest that the researchers should, in principle, be able to reach the same conclusions. In order to make such a claim, however, we need to assume that they are rigorous in their methodology and, more importantly, we need to assume a realist epistemology. If, on the other hand, a constructivist epistemology is assumed, then the outcome is, by assumption, researcher-dependent anyway. However, pursuing this further is beyond the scope of this article.

  11. The investigation I am referring to is social-scientific rather than legal. A legal investigation is investigator-specific, in the sense that it depends on the legal system on whose mandate the investigator performs the investigation. Depending on the nature of the conduct under scrutiny, it is conceivable, even likely, that different conclusions of legal culpability are reached when multiple jurisdictions overlap.

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  1. ALBA Graduate Business School at the American College of Greece, Xenias 6-8, Athens, Greece

    Seraphim Voliotis

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Voliotis, S. Establishing the Normative Standards that Determine Deviance in Organizational Corruption: Is Corruption Within Organizations Antisocial or Unethical?. J Bus Ethics 140, 147–160 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2652-y

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