Behavioral Ethics, Behavioral Governance, and Corruption in and by Organizations

Abstract

Much anti-corruption research, rooted in fields such as legal studies, sociology, political science, and economics, rightly has focused on the structural and institutional underpinnings of corrupt systems and of efforts to mitigate corruption. Important as these considerations are in understanding corruption, at some point these societal and institutional factors must convince individual actors to engage in (or refrain from) corrupt deeds. Misangyi et al. (2008), for example, note how corruption (and anti-corruption efforts) involve an interplay among institutions, the societal resources available to those institutions, and the identities and cognitions of individuals. Although large-scale, societal-level institutions — market structures, political systems, social networks, etc. — provide the frameworks within which individual identities, attitudes, beliefs, and intuitions are shaped, the actions of individuals in turn contribute to the sustaining (or undermining) of those institutions (Giddens, 1984).