Modeling the impact of organization structure and whistle-blowers on intra-organizational corruption contagion
File(s)
Author(s)
Nekovee, Maziar
Pinto, Jonathan
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We complement the rich conceptual work on organizational corruption by quantitatively modeling the spread of corruption within organizations. We systematically vary four organizational culture-related parameters, i.e., organization structure, location of bad apples, employees’ propensity to become corrupted (“corruption probability”), and number of whistle-blowers. Our simulation studies find that in organizations with flatter structures, corruption permeates the organization at a lower threshold value of corruption probability compared to those with taller structures. However, the final proportion of corrupted individuals is higher in the latter as compared to the former. Also, we find that for a 1,000-strong organization, 5% of the workforce is a critical threshold in terms of the number of whistle-blowers needed to constrain the spread of corruption, and if this number is around 25%, the corruption contagion is negligible. Implications of our results are discussed.
Date Issued
2019-05-15
Date Acceptance
2019-01-27
Citation
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, 522, pp.339-349
ISSN
0378-4371
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
339
End Page
349
Journal / Book Title
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
Volume
522
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This manuscript is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Subjects
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Physics, Multidisciplinary
Physics
Intra-organizational corruption
Contagion
Mathematical model
Simulation study
Organization structure
Organizational networks
Whistle-blowing
Critical threshold
UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR
SOCIAL CONTAGION
BAD APPLES
NETWORK
DIFFUSION
FADS
PERSONALITY
INTENTIONS
INNOVATION
INTEGRITY
Fluids & Plasmas
0105 Mathematical Physics
0206 Quantum Physics
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2019-02-01