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Purpose – This chapter reviews the challenges faced by top management teams as they strive to create corporate cultures that combine a high performance with a strong sense of integrity.

Methodology/approach – The chapter integrates diverse theories from organizational research and cognitive psychology, as well as published accounts of ethical breakdowns, to shed new light on the barriers to corporate integrity.

Findings – The chapter distinguishes between two major types of ethical breakdowns.

Conscious transgressions, where the individuals know what they should or should not do, but choose nonetheless to follow the unethical path, a decision that they then need to rationalize and which often places them on a slippery slope.

Unconscious transgressions, where the individuals do not even realize that they are making an inappropriate decision, as they fall prey to ethical fading or to other cognitive biases.

Practical implications – The chapter proposes that top management plays a key role in establishing a climate where employees can speak up, emphasizing the importance of all stakeholders, and investing in training to increase awareness of the cognitive biases that support transgressions.

Social implications – The chapter recommends that management educators must alert students more forcefully to the personal and organizational repercussions of “minor” ethical transgressions; increase student awareness of key cognitive concepts, including ethical fading and other mental biases; and highlight the possible dysfunctions of intuitive remedies, like incentives or rules and regulations.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter provides a clearer analysis of the causes of ethical breakdowns, allowing for more effective prevention.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an ethical perspective that goes beyond best practice in performance measurement systems in the public sector to help minimise unintended and unethical effects.

The paper draws on the ethical concepts of bounded ethicality, ethical blind spots and ethical fading to help illuminate the dark side of performance measurement in public sector organisations.

An understanding of the psychological tendencies that create unethical behaviours will assist compliance with ethics and morality and is a way forward towards minimising the unintended consequences of performance measurement in the public sector.

The findings will assist public sector managers by providing a greater understanding of why so many unethical acts occur and how to overcome ethical failures in the design and use of performance measurement systems.

The study adds value by contributing to performance measurement literature on the need to recognise the limitations of the human mind and innate psychological processes that make people systematically and unknowingly engage in unethical behaviour. The ethical concepts proposed in this paper go beyond the best practice notions of performance measurement and extend the toolkit of performance measurement techniques in the public sector.

How can we explain the unresponsiveness of Internal Audit (IA) amid signs that fraud is arising and spreading within an organization? Internal auditors are entrusted with the formal responsibility of sounding the alarm about the risk of fraud and organizational wrongdoing. However, internal auditors failed to respond as the cross-sell fraud at Wells Fargo’s Community Bank (CB) Division unfolded over more than a decade, growing into a massive, full-fledged scandal. We examine IA as a profession and explore how the interpretation of three classic tenets of auditing (scope, compliance and materiality) may enable organizational wrongdoing to fester unattended until it erupts into yet another scandal. We conclude with implications for the socialization and practice of internal auditors, emphasizing the need for reflexivity and moral judgment in the interpretation and application of tenets so deeply ingrained in the IA profession.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of why sex harassment persists in organizations for prolonged periods – often as an open secret.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 28 people in diverse organizations experiencing persistent sex harassment. Data were analyzed using standard qualitative methods.

The overarching finding was that perpetrators were embedded in networks of complicity that were central to explaining the persistence of sex harassment in organizations. By using power and manipulating information, perpetrators built networks that protected them from sanction and enabled their behavior to continue unchecked. Networks of complicity metastasized and caused lasting harm to victims, other employees and the organization as a whole.

The authors used broad, open-ended questions and guided introspection to guard against the tendency to ask for information to confirm their assumptions, and the authors analyzed the data independently to mitigate subjectivity and establish reliability.

To stop persistent sex harassment, not only must perpetrators be removed, but formal and informal ties among network of complicity members must also be weakened or broken, and victims must be integrated into networks of support. Bystanders must be trained and activated to take positive action, and power must be diffused through egalitarian leadership.

Understanding the power of networks in enabling perpetrators to persist in their destructive behavior is another step in countering sex harassment.

Social network theory has rarely been used to understand sex harassment or why it persists.

The themes of love, commitment and honour are explored within the context of the American Mafia. In most capitalist-focussed conventional organizations managers acquire assets and income through exchanges, through wages, direct operations and build cultures and cultural norms (Friedman, 1970). The authors argue the Mafia organization has similarities and differences to conventional organizations, differences being in how money is acquired and in ethical behaviours which could be described as counter to what is the expectation of conventional organizations. Parallel to the Christian Ten Commandments, baptism and initiation rituals existing within the Mafia are drawn that provide insights into Mafia values that guide behaviours. Honour as a key Mafia value is argued in this article as being a misnomer, being more reflective of dishonourable values of revenge, fear and punishment. Love and commitment within Mafia families ¹ including roles of women are examined. It appears that love for family appears secondary to primary commitment to the Mafia Family. This paper contributes to literature on the Mafia in highlighting how ‘love’ and virtues are relative terms from which unethical acts can be justified within Mafia codes of behaviours. Also highlighted is that organizations valuing vice can survive and sustain if shrouded in secrecy rather than transparency. In the Mafia organization as in conventional organizations, codes of behaviours and commitment central to all money-making organizations are a key to survival.

This paper reviews the field of internal auditing (IA) post-Enron to develop insights into how IA research has developed, offer a critique of the research to date and identify ways that future research can help to advance IA.

A structured literature review (SLR) was used to analyse 471 papers from 64 journals published between 2005 and 2018 based on a number of criteria, namely author, journal type, journal location, year, theme, theory, nature of research, research setting, regional focus, method and citations.

The IA literature has not significantly contributed to knowledge of the internal audit function (IAF), and one still knows relatively little about the factors that contribute to making the impact of IA practice effective and measurable. The IA literature is US-dominated (authors and journals), focussed on the American context (publicly listed companies), reliant on positivist analyses and largely makes no explicit reference to theory. Central regions (emerging economies) and key organisational settings (private SMEs and not-for-profit organisations) are largely absent in prior IA research. This paper evaluates and identifies avenues through which future research can help to advance IA in order to address emerging challenges in the field.

This is the first comprehensive review to analyse IA research in the post-Enron period (2005–2018). The findings are relevant to researchers who are looking for appropriate research outlets and emerging scholars who wish to identify their own research directions.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the prominent cognitive biases that influence Lean practices in organisations that have a multi-cultural work environment which will aid the organisational managers and academics in enhancing the understanding of the human thought process and mitigate them suitably.

A multiple case study was conducted in organisations that were previously committed to Lean practices and had a multi-cultural work environment. This research was conducted on five companies based on 99 in-depth semi-structured interviews and seven process observations that sought to establish the system-wide cognitive biases present in a multi-cultural Lean environment.

The novel findings indicate that nine new biases influence Lean implementation and practices in a multi-cultural environment. This study also found strong connectivity between Lean practices and 45 previously identified biases that could affect positively or negatively the lean methodologies and their implementation. Biases were resilient enough that their influence on Lean in multi-cultural workplaces, even with transient populations, did not demonstrate cultural differentiation.

Like any qualitative research, constructivism and narrative analyses are subjected to understanding based on knowledge gained on the subject, and data may have been interpreted differently. Constructivist co-recreation of process scenarios based result limitations is therefore acknowledged. The interactive participation in exploring the knowledge sought after and interaction that could have a probable influence on the participant need to be acknowledged. However, the research design, multiple methods of data collection, generalisation based on data collection and analysis methods limit the effects of these and findings are reliable to a greater extent.

The results can provide an enhanced understanding of biases and insights into a new managerial approach to take remedial steps on biases’ influence on Lean practices that can result in improved productivity and well-being from a business process perspective. Understanding and mitigating the prominent biases can aid Lean manufacturing processes and support decision makers and line managers in improving lean methodologies’ effectiveness and productivity. The biases can be negated and used to implement decisions with ease. The influence of biases and the model could be used as a basis to counter implementation barriers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that connects the cognitive perspectives of Lean business processes in a multi-cultural environment to identify the cognitive biases that influence Lean practices in organisations that were previously committed to Lean practices. The novel findings indicate that nine new biases and 45 previously identified biases influence Lean implementation and practices in a multi-cultural environment. The second novelty of this study shows the connection between cognitive biases, Lean implementation and practices in multi-cultural business processes.

Reflections on gender and OD over a 50-year career as a scholar, an OD practitioner, and a woman managing a complex life and career.

My journey in OD has spanned 50 years which is also about as long organization development has been around. In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences with special attention to issues of gender. I will also mention some issues of concern that confront us as OD scholars and practitioners, especially the balance between thinking and doing. As I describe my experiences, I hope they will lead to an appreciation of all that has happened in just 50 years! My experience is not everyone’s experience. I make no claim to that. I hope that some of the issues I raise resonate with you, or fill in some blanks, or lend a different perspective.

The status quo for managing deviant workplace behavior is underperforming. The current research offers a new approach for scholars and managers in approaching these misbehaviors. Namely, we outline how system justification theory, which holds that people are motivated to rationalize and justify the systems—including workplaces—to which they belong even when those systems disadvantage them or others, offers value in explaining and addressing the prevalence of such misbehaviors and contemporary failures in managing them.

This conceptual research explores the situated role of onlookers to patterns of workplace misbehavior, like harassment. We explore existing scholarship on why and how onlookers respond to such actions, including cultural elements, and draw parallels between those accounts and the foundational concepts of system justification theory to demonstrate an unrealized theoretical overlap valuable for its immediate applications in research.

The current paper establishes clear links between system justification theory and efforts to manage misbehavior, establishing system justifications as freezing forces in the culture of a workplace that must be unfrozen to successfully implement strategies for managing misbehavior. Further, we describe how organizational onlookers to misbehavior are subject to system justifications, which limit prescribed means of stopping these patterns of wrongdoing.

Very limited organizational scholarship has utilized system justification theory, despite calls for such applications. Given the existing shortcomings in scholarship and management approaches to workplace misbehavior, the current research breaks from the status quo and offers an established theory as a new way to approach these misbehaviors.

Contemporary urban and regional planning practice and scholarship often fails to address the full implications of technological change (technology blindness), lacks a clear or consistent definition of the long term (temporal imprecision) and seldom uses formal foresight methodologies. Discussion in the literature of time horizons beyond 10 years is, therefore, based on profoundly unrealistic assumptions about the future. The paper aims to discuss why conventional reasoning about possible futures is problematic, how consideration of long-term timescales is informal and inconsistent and why accelerating technological change requires that planners rethink basic assumptions about the future from 2030s onward.

The author reviews 1,287 articles published between January 2010 and December 2014 in three emblematic urban and regional planning journals using directed content analysis of key phrases pertaining to long-term planning, futures studies and self-driving cars.

The author finds that there is no evidence of consistent usage of the phrase long term, that timeframes are defined in fewer than 10 per cent of articles and that self-driving cars and related phrases occur nowhere in the text, even though this technology is likely to radically transform urban transportation and form starting in the early 2020s. Despite its importance, discussion of disruptive technological change in the urban and regional planning literature is extremely limited.

To make more realistic projections of the future from the late 2020s onward, planning practitioners and scholars should: attend more closely to the academic and public technology discourses; specify explicit timeframes in any discussion or analysis of the future; and incorporate methods from futures studies such as foresight approaches into long-term planning.

This paper identifies accelerating technological change as a major conceptual gap in the urban and regional planning literature and calls for practitioners and scholars to rethink their foundational assumptions about the long-term and possible, probable and preferable futures accordingly.