Ethical spillovers in firms: evidence from vehicle emissions testing

In this paper, we explore how organizations influence the unethical behavior of their employees. Using a unique data set of over three million vehicle emissions tests, we find strong evidence of ethical spillovers from firms to individuals. When inspectors work across different organizations, they adjust the rate at which they pasfvs vehicles to the norms of those with whom they work. These spillovers are strongest at large facilities and corporate chains, and weakest for the large-volume inspectors. These results are consistent with the economics literature on productivity spillovers from organizations and peers and suggest that managers can influence the ethics of employee behavior through both formal norms and incentives. The results also suggest that employees have persistent ethics that limit the magnitude of this influence. These results imply that if ethical conformity is important to the financial and legal health of the organization, managers must be vigilant in their hiring, training, and monitoring to ensure that employee behavior is consistent with firm objectives. Key words: peer effects; spillovers; fraud; corruption; productivity; ethics History: Accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations and social networks; received May 16, 2007. This paper was with the authors 91/2 months for 2 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance October 10, 2008.
1. Introduction The influence of organizations on individual behavior has been broadly studied in the economics, sociology, and management literatures. Both theoretical work and empirical research have examined how organizations [...]