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Toxic Corporate Culture: Assessing Organizational Processes of Deviancy
Administrative Sciences
Abstract and Figures
There is widespread recognition that organizational culture matters in corporations involved in systemic crime and wrongdoing. However, we know far less about how to assess and alter toxic elements within a corporate culture. The present paper draws on management science, anthropology, sociology of law, criminology, and social psychology to explain what organizational culture is and how it can sustain illegal and harmful corporate behavior. Through analyzing the corporate cultures at BP, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo, this paper demonstrates that organizational toxicity does not just exist when corporate norms are directly opposed to legal norms, but also when: (a) it condones, neutralizes, or enables rule breaking; (b) it disables and obstructs compliance; and (c) actual practices contrast expressed compliant values. The paper concludes that detoxing corporate culture requires more than changing leadership or incentive structures. In particular, it requires addressing the structures, values, and practices that enable violations and obstruct compliance within an organization, as well as moving away from a singular focus on liability management (i.e., assigning blame and punishment) to an approach that prioritizes promoting transparency, honesty, and a responsibility to initiate and sustain actual cultural change.
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... Most of the recent literature in healthcare focuses on perceptions of OC among patient-facing employees in health systems instead of perceptions of non-patient-facing employees. Since OC can influence behavior and work performance among all employees, further research is needed about the perceptions of OC among non-patient-facing employees (Simpson et al., 2014;van Rooij and Fine, 2018). The behavior and work performance of non-patient-facing employees could impact patient care. ...
Purpose
The significance of organizational culture (OC) pervades all workplaces, extending even to health systems. While numerous studies have examined the perceptions of OC among nurses and physicians, there is a notable gap in understanding the perspectives of non-patient-facing health system employees. This study aims to fill this void by investigating the perceptions and drivers of OC among non-patient-facing personnel within health systems.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employed a mixed-methods approach, starting with a 31-question survey disseminated to health system employees through trade organizations to capture diverse perspectives on OC. Subsequently, employees were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. A total of 23 interviews were conducted to explore the underlying factors shaping employees’ perceptions of OC.
Findings
A total of 67 surveys were completed, with 61 used in the analysis. The results revealed a predominantly positive outlook, highlighting the significance of supportive leadership and involvement in decision-making processes. The qualitative analysis identified four key themes: effective communication and transparency, coordinated teamwork, supportive leadership and the impact of external factors like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Practical implications
Effective leadership should prioritize open communication, employee autonomy and involvement in decision-making. These strategies foster a culture of trust, accountability and engagement, enhancing employee morale and job satisfaction while promoting a collaborative and innovative work environment conducive to long-term success and growth.
Originality/value
This research examines the often-overlooked perspectives of non-patient-facing health system staff, providing valuable insights and strategies for leaders to improve OC and create a more positive, inclusive and supportive work environment.
... The modern literature also establish link between total reward system and satisfaction (Sarkar et al., 2021). Literature establishes a link between ethical values and rewards system (Benjamin & Fine, 2018) which also corresponds to Islamic philosophy of motivation. Islam also emphasized the extrinsic motives to achieve higher performance. ...
... Em ambientes onde a cultura é tóxica, as políticas de integridade formalmente estabelecidas podem ser ignoradas ou mal interpretadas pelos funcionários. Isso ocorre porque a cultura tóxica pode distorcer a interpretação e a implementação das políticas, criando uma discrepância significativa entre o que é oficialmente proclamado pela gestão e o que é efetivamente praticado no cotidiano ( VAN ROOIJ & FINE, 2018). ...
Agradecimentos PUC MINAS Resumo Este artigo teórico examina elementos que podem influenciar a eficácia dos programas de integridade em organizações de capital aberto. O texto está estruturado em quatro seções teóricas: a ambiguidade das regras e padrões institucionais; dependências dos programas de integridade; os riscos dos programas meramente simbólicos; e a influência da cultura organizacional para a integridade. Através de uma revisão da literatura, o ensaio identifica dois componentes principais que determinam a eficácia desses programas: esforços formais e explícitos para cumprir leis; e influências informais que moldam a cultura organizacional em direção a comportamentos éticos. O artigo conclui que, embora os programas de integridade sejam cruciais para a conformidade legal e a governança ética, sua eficácia no mundo real depende fortemente da adoção cultural genuína e do comprometimento visível da liderança organizacional. Com isso, sublinha-se o papel crítico dos programas de integridade em melhorar a transparência e a confiança corporativa, e enfatiza-se a necessidade de uma abordagem holística, que integre tanto mecanismos formais quanto práticas culturais éticas para incorporar a integridade nas operações organizacionais.
... Em ambientes onde a cultura é tóxica, as políticas de integridade formalmente estabelecidas podem ser ignoradas ou mal interpretadas pelos funcionários. Isso ocorre porque a cultura tóxica pode distorcer a interpretação e a implementação das políticas, criando uma discrepância significativa entre o que é oficialmente proclamado pela gestão e o que é efetivamente praticado no cotidiano ( VAN ROOIJ & FINE, 2018). ...
Este artigo teórico examina elementos que podem influenciar a eficácia dos programas de integridade em organizações de capital aberto. O texto está estruturado em quatro seções teóricas: a ambiguidade das regras e padrões institucionais; dependências dos programas de integridade; os riscos dos programas meramente simbólicos; e a influência da cultura organizacional para a integridade. Através de uma revisão da literatura, o ensaio identifica dois componentes principais que determinam a eficácia desses programas: esforços formais e explícitos para cumprir leis; e influências informais que moldam a cultura organizacional em direção a comportamentos éticos. O artigo conclui que, embora os programas de integridade sejam cruciais para a conformidade legal e a governança ética, sua eficácia no mundo real depende fortemente da adoção cultural genuína e do comprometimento visível da liderança organizacional. Com isso, sublinha-se o papel crítico dos programas de integridade em melhorar a transparência e a confiança corporativa, e enfatiza-se a necessidade de uma abordagem holística, que integre tanto mecanismos formais quanto práticas culturais éticas para incorporar a integridade nas operações organizacionais.
Ebrahimi, M. (2025). Review of Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Cambridge Open Engage. doi:10.33774/coe-2025-5q6mh
Effective leadership behaviors, whether in healthcare, politics, education, tourism, technology, or any other sector, are pivotal in steering organizations and their workforce towards a meaningful and sustainable future. Regardless of whether leaders are born or made, the consequences of poor leadership behaviors can often leave lasting challenges that can be difficult to rectify. This book review explores Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't by Simon Sinek. The book delves into the importance of effective leadership by examining significant concepts such as belonging, safety, empathy, cooperation, community, workplace culture, and the development of workplaces and teams where individuals feel safe, have a sense of belonging, and thrive. The book's eight sections and 27 chapters cover diverse themes, such as the biological drivers of behavior, the risks of abstract decision-making, and the effects of organizational culture on leadership and team dynamics. To offer a more thorough theoretical perspective and connect with scholarly literature, I have taken the initiative to identify key theories related to each section of the book and include them in an appendix. This effort links Sinek's practical insights with established scholarly theories and frameworks, further enriching the review and benefiting the reader.
Act Number 1 of 2023 concerning the Criminal Code (National Criminal Code) has accommodated corporations as perpetrators of criminal acts as well as natural humans. With distinct characteristic to natural humans, the attribution of corporate criminal responsibility to corporations is also distinct to natural humans. The National Criminal Code stipulates the attribution of corporate blameworthiness, one of which is the corporate culture model theory, but not explicitly as a reason for corporate’s legal defenses. It is distinct to the Australian Criminal Code Act 1995 which strictly stipulates the corporate culture model as a corporate’ legal defense. This article aims to analyze the corporate culture model theory in corporate criminal law theory to be used as a corporate’s legal defense. This article is a doctrinal legal research through literature study with the statutory approach, conceptual approach and comparative approach. The research prescribes that the corporate culture model should be explicitly stipulated as corporate’s legal defense in the National Criminal Code in order to provide theoretical legitimation for the corporate punishment
Rule-breaking has been a prominent topic in entrepreneurship research. There are widely held beliefs in society and by researchers that entrepreneurial rule-breaking is dysfunctional and has roots in deviance. Such beliefs and assumptions are problematic, because the resultant fallacy is that the behaviour from which strategic advantages, entrepreneurial innovation, creation of consumer surplus and social welfare, and progressive institutional betterments stem is underlied by nonconformity, risk-taking, self-enhancement, and other traits that are regarded as deviant. This thesis investigates an under-researched aspect of entrepreneurial rule-breaking (entrepreneurial rule-breaking) which is posited to be stemming from rationality and functional traits and can have positive impacts on entrepreneurs and society. It has advanced the knowledge of entrepreneurial rule-breaking in numerous ways. The first paper was a purely conceptual paper whereby a morally neutral definition of entrepreneurial rule-breaking was proposed based on the nature of its functionality (i.e., alleviating the regulating power of formal rules) along with an integrative entrepreneurial rule-breaking theory centring on a novel cognitive construct—constructive rule beliefs .
Based on democratic values stemming from cognitive schemas, constructive rule beliefs denotes peoples’ general beliefs about the purpose, legitimacy, and instrumentality of formal rules, and about the self in relation to rules, and was argued to be a cause of rule-breaking, which enhanced the likelihood of rule-breaking in the context of various contextual triggers. The second paper was a scale development paper which also served to assess various predictions stemming from the first paper. Using exploratory factor analysis, a constructive rule beliefs measure was developed. A two-factor structure emerged and the two factors were termed rule relativity beliefs (F1) and rule purpose beliefs (F2). Empirical evidence supported that constructive rule beliefs was a meaningful cognitive construct, and rule relativity beliefs was predictive of goal-directed entrepreneurial rule-breaking.
The third paper provided the primary test of the core theoretical proposition from the newly-proposed entrepreneurial rule-breaking theory. Based on a 2x2 between-subjects experimental design, the third paper tested the causal relationships between entrepreneurial rule-breaking and rule breaking behavior related to two hypothetical scenarios (constructive rule beliefs and entrepreneurial status). By experimentally manipulating constructive rule beliefs, it was found that constructive rule beliefs had a casual influence on participant rule-breaking tendencies when rule-breaking was clearly conducive to entrepreneurial goals. No relationship was found between entrepreneurial status and entrepreneurial rule-breaking. These findings support that constructive rule beliefs has a causal impact on entrepreneurial rule-breaking and can stem from rationality and functional traits—at least in situations whereby rule-breaking may assist with goal attainment. In doing so, they also challenge the widely-held beliefs that entrepreneurial rule-breaking is based on deviance.
Through constructive rule beliefs and the integrative entrepreneurial rule-breaking theory, this thesis provides evidence for a novel potential cognitive driver of entrepreneurial rule-breaking which is functional and can be beneficial to entrepreneurs and society. Future research can build on the initial work and findings in this thesis to provide further insight into the complex and fascinating phenomenon of rule-breaking in entrepreneurship and in other contexts.
Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insights that are essential for fostering trust and combating corruption. In this review, we synthesize key findings from research on honesty, focusing on when people choose to be truthful or deceptive. We argue that although much is known about honesty in isolated, low-risk contexts, an urgent need exists to study honesty in more complex, realistic settings, such as those involving interpersonal relationships, potential sanctions, or group influences. Our proposed framework highlights understudied contexts and encourages future studies to explore settings where enforcement and social dynamics play a significant role in decision-making. To do so, we point out 66 open research questions that we find most promising to explore. By integrating insights from multiple disciplines, we aim to advance the understanding of honesty and provide a roadmap for research that can inform policies and interventions to promote integrity in society.
The barrage of stories from athletes about their experiences of maltreatment in sport has led some to conclude that sport is “in crisis”. Across sport types and levels, men’s and women’s sports, and countries, stories of athletes’ experiences of maltreatment are remarkably similar, pointing to the central role played by sport cultures and norms. The characteristics of sport cultures that increase vulnerability to maltreatment experiences bear resemblance to the characteristics of toxic cultures, including being authoritarian and fear-based, and devoid of values and diversity. In this chapter, the powerful role of social norms will be emphasized to understand sport as a toxic culture and to suggest ways of de-toxifying this culture. Recommendations are made to revise the predominant social norms in sport through changes in environmental cues and the engagement and empowerment of all stakeholders to affect cultural change.
This paper aims to establish how organization and management research, an extensive field that has contributed a great deal to research on corruption, could apply insights from other disciplines in order to advance the understanding of corruption, often considered as a form of unethical behavior in organizations. It offers an analysis of important contributions of corruption research, taking a ‘rationalist perspective’, and highlights the central tensions and debates within this vast body of literatures. It then shows how these debates can be addressed by applying insights from corruption studies, adopting anthropological lens. The paper thus proposes a cross-disciplinary approach, which focuses on studying corruption by looking at what it means to individuals implicated by the phenomenon while engaging in social relations and situated in different contexts. It also offers an alternative approach to the study of corruption amidst claims that anti-corruption efforts have failed to achieve desirable results.
In September 2015, the Volkswagen Group (VW) admitted the use of 'defeat devices' designed to lower emissions measured during VW vehicle testing for regulatory purposes. Globally, 11 million cars sold between 2008 and 2015 are affected, including about 2.6 million in Germany. On-road emissions tests have yielded mean on-road NOx emissions for these cars of 0.85 g km⁻¹, over four times the applicable European limit of 0.18 g km⁻¹. This study estimates the human health impacts and costs associated with excess emissions from VW cars driven in Germany. A distribution of on-road emissions factors is derived from existing measurements and combined with sales data and a vehicle fleet model to estimate total excess NOx emissions. These emissions are distributed on a 25 by 28 km grid covering Europe, using the German Federal Environmental Protection Agency's (UBA) estimate of the spatial distribution of NOx emissions from passenger cars in Germany. We use the GEOS-Chem chemistry-transport model to predict the corresponding increase in population exposure to fine particulate matter and ozone in the European Union, Switzerland, and Norway, and a set of concentration-response functions to estimate mortality outcomes in terms of early deaths and of life-years lost. Integrated over the sales period (2008–2015), we estimate median mortality impacts from VW excess emissions in Germany to be 1200 premature deaths in Europe, corresponding to 13 000 life-years lost and 1.9 billion EUR in costs associated with life-years lost. Approximately 60% of mortality costs occur outside Germany. For the current fleet, we estimate that if on-road emissions for all affected VW vehicles in Germany are reduced to the applicable European emission standard by the end of 2017, this would avert 29 000 life-years lost and 4.1 billion 2015 EUR in health costs (median estimates) relative to a counterfactual case with no recall.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries.
This article demonstrates how the content and meaning of California’s consumer protection laws were shaped by automobile manufacturers, the very group these laws were designed to regulate. My analysis draws on and links two literatures that examine the relationship between law and organizations but often overlook one another: political science studies of how businesses influence public legal institutions, and neo-institutional sociology studies of how organizations shape law within their organizational field. By integrating these literatures, I develop an “institutional-political” theory that demonstrates how organizations’ construction of law and compliance within an organizational field shapes the meaning of law among legislators and judges. This study examines case law and more than 35 years of California legislative history concerning its consumer warranty laws. Using institutional and political analysis, I show how auto manufacturers, who were initially subject to powerful consumer protection laws, weakened the impact of these laws by creating dispute resolution venues. The legislature and courts subsequently incorporated private dispute resolution venues into statutes and court decisions and made consumer rights and remedies largely contingent on consumers first using manufacturer-sponsored venues. Organizational venue creation resulted in public legal rights being redefined and controlled by private organizations.
Purpose
This paper aims to identify social psychological root causes of misconduct by traders and offers practical guidelines to prevent misconduct.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use insights on social psychological mechanisms to examine current business practices observed in the context of supervisory activities. Case examples were collected at Dutch and European banks, including major institutions. This is an opinion peace that interprets regulator experiences from a social psychological perspective.
Findings
The authors characterize standard responses to misconduct in trading as reactive and elucidate why this “bad apples” perspective is insufficiently effective. As an alternative, the authors address the social psychological root causes of misconduct within trading teams. The “corrupting barrels” model identifies ineffective error approaches, outcome inequality and dysfunctional moral climates as contextual root causes in team dynamics. The model uses current insights from empirical research in psychology to do so.
Practical implications
This paper specifies practical guidelines that help prevent future misconduct among traders.
Originality/value
Addressing the contextual root causes of misconduct at the team level will help banks and financial supervisors to improve their effectiveness in preventing misconduct. In the context of standard “bad apples” approaches, the “corrupting barrels” model offers an original perspective.