Organizational Integrity and Human Maliciousness

Abstract

Recent decades have seen many instances of moral misconduct of organizations. Enron (fraud, corruption, greed, in 2007), Siemens (bribery in, 2006) and BP (negligence and environmental damage, in 2010) are just three world famous examples out of a long list. I define moral misconduct of organizations as something that happens when actions that — sociologically speaking — there is reason to attribute to an organization have consequences that constitute an infringement of the legal or moral rights of those outside the organization. The high number of incidents of organizational misconduct has led to an intensified interest in (explicit) ethics program within organizations.