Search results

The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal was one of the largest examples of organizational wrongdoing in corporate history, costing the firm immense damage to its reputation and over $33 billion in fines, penalties, financial settlements, and buyback costs. In this paper, we draw on the concept of boundary work to provide insight into the causes of wrongdoing at VW. Supplementing other work on the scandal, we show how the ways in which boundaries became established in the organization resulted in an internal context that defined “in” and “out” groups, normalized certain behaviors, and limited communication across intraorganizational boundaries. This allowed wrongdoing to not only become established but also to go unchallenged. We provide contributions to broader understandings of organizational wrongdoing and to the temporal unfolding of boundary work by theorizing how a combination of cognitive, horizontal, and vertical boundaries can create an infrastructure of organizational design that permits organizational wrongdoing, prevents it being challenged, and ultimately normalizes it in everyday activities.

This paper was formulated to address the impact of different individual decision modes on purchasing managers' satisfaction and find out whether different environments could influence the strength of the relationship between the sourcing managers' individual modes and their decisions.

A new model was built based on the variables selected from literature. Two identical surveys were sent to manufacturing firms in China and Egypt. Around 450 questionnaires have been sent to respondents, and about 300 responses have been collected in the two countries.

The key findings of this study showed that although the influence of decision modes is not changeable across decision-makers in different markets' environment, the strength of the relationship between different individual decision modes and the buying decision significantly differed across different dynamic task environments of buyers.

The research in this paper focused on the purchasing managers' individual decision-making. On the other hand, purchasing managers' market environment is rarely recognized as a main factor affecting their decisions. Furthermore, this research tries to understand more about the supplier selection decision-making in Eastern Asian and Middle Eastern countries.