组织情境中腐败的研究进展

随着公司各类丑闻和腐败事件的不断曝光,腐败受到管理学领域的广泛关注。本文基于腐败的定义,对个体腐败和组织腐败的影响因素加以回顾,从动态和多层次的视角总结了腐败从个体现象演变成群体或组织现象的过程模型,主要包括腐败常规化模型、道德推脱模型、社会认同模型和情绪诱发模型。最后,从探索其他影响因素及交互作用、对群体腐败提出假设并检验、进一步构建腐败理论三个方面对该领域的未来研究方向做出展望。

Corruption in Organizations

As an increasing number of corporate scandals are exposed, corruption in organizations is a frontier and challenging issue in the field of management and organization research. The aim of this article is to organize and summarize existing empirical and theoretical work on corruption in organizations from a dynamic and multi-level perspective. Corruption in organizations is defined as “the misuse of authority for personal, subunit and/or organizational gain’’. Corruption is both a dynamic process as well as the outcome of that dynamic process. There are multi-level factors that influence corruption at individual or organizational level as an outcome. The causes of corruption at individual level include personal factors such as Machiavellianism, social dominance orientation, locus of control and values, and organizational factors such as ethical climate and organizational structure. The causes of corruption at organizational level include organizational cultures, organizational procedures, organizational characteristics such as leaders’ social network, firm size and firm ownership, and environmental factors such as market competition, government intervention, welfare socialism and political constrains. This is followed by explanations of corruption as a dynamic process. The article elaborates four process models of corruption in organizations: normalization of corruption, moral disengagement model, social identity model, and emotion-evoked corruption model. The normalization of corruption model argues that three processes by which corruption becomes embedded in the organization: (a) institutionalization, where an initial corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in structures and then routinized; (b) rationalization, where corrupt individuals use self-serving ideologies to justify and legitimate corruption; and (c) socialization, where newcomers are taught to accept and engage in corruption practices. Moral disengagement model suggests that moral disengagement initiates corruption by both easing and expediting individual unethical decision-making that advances organizational interests, and facilitates organizational corruption through dampening individuals’ ethical awareness, and finally results in the perpetuation of corruption in organizations. Social identity model explains how divergent norms, pressure and opportunity lead to the spread and growth of corruption in organizations. Corruption grows in organizations when norms of groups change because of positive intergroup distinctiveness, and when employees feel pressured by organizational performance and try to ward off identity threats through committing corruption, and when managers fail to sanction corrupt acts and change the prototype of the group. The emotion-evoked corruption model focuses on the effect of moral emotions on both the initial response of a target individual and the spread of corruption to non-targeted individuals through emotional contagion. For both processes the model explains how self-directed moral emotions (guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride) facilitate the spread of corruption, and how other-directed moral emotions (anger and contempt) do not. The paper ends with three directions for future research. First of all, it is necessary to explore other factors influencing corruption such as interpersonal influence and types of corruption and the moderation across multi-level. Secondly, future scholars should conduct empirical research on corruption at group level. Thirdly, researchers should continue to develop corruption theories that better account for the intuitive and affective processes and phenomena in China.