1. Modeling the impact of organization structure and whistle-blowers on intra-organizational corruption contagion.
- Author
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Nekovee, Maziar and Pinto, Jonathan
- Subjects
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CORRUPTION , *WHISTLEBLOWING , *ORGANIZATIONAL structure , *CONTAGION (Social psychology) , *SIMULATION methods & models , *CORPORATE culture - Abstract
Abstract We complement the rich conceptual work on organizational corruption by quantitatively modeling the spread of corruption within organizations. We systematically vary four organizational culture-related parameters, i.e., organization structure, location of bad apples , employees' propensity to become corrupted ("corruption probability"), and number of whistle-blowers. Our simulation studies find that in organizations with flatter structures, corruption permeates the organization at a lower threshold value of corruption probability compared to those with taller structures. However, the final proportion of corrupted individuals is higher in the latter as compared to the former. Also, we find that for a 1,000-strong organization, 5% of the workforce is a critical threshold in terms of the number of whistle-blowers needed to constrain the spread of corruption, and if this number is around 25%, the corruption contagion is negligible. Implications of our results are discussed. Highlights • Bridges two research streams, organizational corruption and social contagion. • New quantitative time-evolved cross-complex organizational networks corruption model. • Assesses impact of organization structure, bad apple locations, on corruption spread. • Introduces, and assesses impact of, whistle-blowers on corruption spreading. • Flatter structures are more easily corruptible but spread is lower than taller ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
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