Exploring Organizational Deception: Organizational Contexts, Social Relations and Types of Lying

Abstract

This review paper extends our understanding of organizational deception. We focus specifically on the telling of lies – defined as a false statement with the intent to deceive – as the most common form of deception. We draw new insights from the limited number of existing studies of organizational deception in order to develop a taxonomy of lies and provide an integrative framing for the analysis of lying in organizational contexts. We engage relational sociology to develop this theoretical framing around three key dimensions: organizational context, social relations and actors’ behaviours. From a detailed examination of eleven prior studies, we interrelate these dimensions to identify distinct patterns of lying that are triggered or enabled by social relations or organizational contexts, or both. Based on this theoretical synthesis of prior work, we then demonstrate the utility of the framework in fostering comparative analysis by examining four recent studies of strategic deception in depth. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our framework and suggesting an agenda for further research.