A new paper co-authored by faculty at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business and Rutgers’ Business School examines corruption in the workplace and postulates that even the moral and well-intentioned can fall into corrupt practices — and emotions play a pivotal role. Although corruption in the workplace is usually seen as the seedy underbelly of corporate America, reserved for high-level executives acting willfully against the moral heart of their organization, the theory put forward in the paper indicates corruption is not reserved for only the greedy.

While research in the field of organizational corruption has largely focused on the end result of corruption and its effects in the workplace, very little research has been done to understand how corruption spreads – how the wrongdoing of one or a few people turns into a coordinated effort of a number of people to do wrong on behalf of their organizations.

“It’s not too hard to understand how greed can lead people to succumb to the temptations of corruption,” said Kristin Smith-Crowe, one of the authors of this new theory. “It’s fascinating to us that morally minded people can succumb to corruption. We think that the reason lies in a failure of the self-regulation system. Not a failure of the system to engage – which is how we typically think of regulatory failure – but a failure stemming from the input of the system. Basically, our moral emotions can be misleading.”

The paper, titled “The Emotion-Evoked Collective Corruption Model: The Role of Emotion in the Spread of Corruption within Organizations,” will be published in an upcoming issue of Organization Science. Smith-Crowe and her co-author, Danielle Warren of Rutgers’ School of Business, began investigating how those with good morals become corrupted. They found that new theory was needed as a framework for the experiments they wanted to conduct.

“This is a complicated problem,” Smith-Crowe said. “We don’t know very much about this area, and we can’t always jump in and collect data until we’ve thought it through, which is why we have developed this theory.”

This new theory, called the Emotion-Evoked Collective Corruption Process, outlines how corruption spreads among the well-intentioned by analyzing emotional responses when people are censured at work for something that would be acceptable outside of the organization. In other words, they’re called out for doing the right thing because it conflicts with existing corrupt practices; they’re told they should “do right” by the organization by doing things “the right way” or “the way we do things around here.”  This kind of message can elicit feelings of embarrassment, guilt or shame and make people feel that they’ve done wrong even when they haven’t. They may eventually come to think of corrupt practices as moral – as something they should do as a good employee.

“When people experience emotions like shame, guilt or embarrassment, they may think that they’ve done something wrong even if they haven’t,” Smith-Crowe said. “Emotions like these are part of our self-regulatory system. Normally they function to keep us in line but with the wrong input, they may lead us astray.”

Even more insidious may be the process of emotional contagion. Coworkers can “catch” the embarrassment, guilt or shame of those censured and also can come to thing of corrupt practices as the right thing to do. According to Smith-Crowe, “it’s the process of emotional contagion that can help explain how corruption can become so widespread so efficiently. The effects of censures can net bystanders as well as the intended targets.”

But not everyone is expected to respond this way to censures. People who work for a paycheck and don’t care how others in the organization think about them are likely to experience anger or contempt. These emotions suggest that they haven’t done anything wrong. They are not likely to yield to pressure to join in corrupt practices, or at least not unless those who sign their paychecks are watching.

So is corruption in the workplace inevitable? Not according to this theory. Managers can foster morality by monitoring what is communicated to employees. The same process that can lead to the morally-minded engaging in corruption, can also foster adherence to moral norms. It’s a matter of ensuring the right input into the regulatory system. Subordinates can also foster moral actions by not buying into what is being purported and staying true to the morals they espouse.

Smith-Crowe and Warren plan to test the process by conducting experiments to test how willing people are to change their moral beliefs under the influence of different emotions.