Culture at work. Examining the role of culture in explaining organisational misbehaviour.

In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the workplace as a crime scene and the employee as an actor of deviance. Despite this attention, there are still a number of methodological and theoretical issues that deserve further attention from researchers. This study hopes to provide some answers to these limitations by contributing to the measurement and explanation of organisational misbehaviour. The project will be a theoretically embedded survey-research on antecedents of organisational misbehaviour. The theory will draw from literature on organizational crime and organizational ethics, but also from organizational psychology and anthropology. As for the latter, the proposed theory strongly draws from grid-group cultural theory. This theory provides the core hypothesis of the theoretical framework, as it predicts that certain types of organizational culture will be associated with certain types of organisational misbehaviour. In addition to this central hypothesis, the theory will also include hypotheses about the impact of factors such as person-organization fit, work satisfaction, economic strain, stress and individual values on organisational misbehaviour. The variables will first be operationalized into a survey-instrument, which will then be used to test the theory in organizations within different sectors in the region of Flanders in Belgium.

Keywords:Organisational misbehavior, Cultural theory, Unethical behaviour, Organisational culture, Integrity, Criminology

Disciplines:Criminology