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Little research has focused on the consequences of corruption on civil servants’ performance outside OECD countries. Yet, corruption is endemic in many countries, and it is unclear how it affects performance and how can organizations use HRM practices to tackle the issue. While most research remains at the national level, we explored corruption’s impact at the individual level of performance. To test these issues, we obtained a unique data set from 1,344 civil servants in Bhutan via a random sampling of the entire civil servants’ population. We contribute to the theory of planned-action/behavior by testing empirically a model linking corruption, job-satisfaction, selected HRM practices and performance. The findings support the ‘sand in the wheel’ theoretical perspective of corruption. The results of SEM analysis reveal that job-satisfaction mediates the relationship between corruption and individual performance. Corruption exhibits an indirect negative one performance via job-satisfaction. Moreover, autonomy, performance-management and promotion opportunities improve job-satisfaction. The lack of linkage between some HRM practices and performance calls into question the contextual application of HRM practices. We offer practical insights into how civil servants’ job-satisfaction and performance can be improved by promoting ethical, anti-corruption policies along with contextualized HRM policies to enhance job-satisfaction.

The personalization–privacy paradox persists because consumers appreciate the value of personalization, yet marketers’ exploitation of consumers’ personal information to provide such personalization raises privacy concerns. Consumers then may refuse to provide personal information, which limits personalization efforts. Attempts to rely on information technology (e.g., anonymizing techniques, peer-to-peer communication) to address privacy concerns largely have proven ineffective, often because they are overly sophisticated for consumers. Thus, even if the personalization–privacy paradox seemingly arose with mobile technologies, it must stem from a theoretical foundation. Prior information systems literature tends to adopt micro-oriented theories to understand the paradox, but this perspective article instead seeks to investigate the personalization–privacy paradox at a macro level, with an attention economy lens. By investigating the relationship among personalization, privacy, and attention, this study seeks to offer insights pertaining to the ecology of attention, choice architectures, and stylistic devices, as well as some relevant implications for research and practice.