What Can Management Science Teach Criminology? The Relevance of Organizational Culture for Predicting Organizational Misconduct

Abstract

Cultural explanations are routinely invoked in regulatory, journalistic, and academic accounts of organizational scandals. Yet despite the broad consensus that organizational culture matters, organizational criminology has produced relatively little systematic work on the concept. By contrast, fields like management sciences, organizational psychology, and safety research have developed an extensive conceptual and empirical literature on the relationship between organizational culture and various forms of misconduct; whether these insights can be translated to the study of corporate and organizational crime is, however, an open question. The present paper addresses this question through an integrative review of the literature, evaluating associated empirical outcomes of four organizational culture constructs – ethical culture, safety culture, masculinity culture, and risk culture – against four dimensions of criminologically relevant misconduct: deviance, intentionality, intended target, and impact. It finds that, while these constructs are widely used in management research to explain wrongdoing, and associated with misconduct as operationalized in that field, the outcomes studied tend to fall short of the more deviant, intentional, and harmful behaviors that lie at the heart of organizational criminology. We argue that this represents an opportunity and outline a research agenda for adapting management science constructs and methods to study organizational misconduct.

Introduction

Over the past decades, a growing body of investigative journalism, regulatory inquiries, and academic research has documented how major cases of organizational wrongdoing are rarely the product of isolated individual deviance (e.g., Hald et al., 2021; Van Rooij & Fine, 2018). Instead, high-profile cases, from the manipulation of emissions data at Volkswagen to the crash of two Boeing planes, have revealed patterns of misconduct that appear deeply embedded in organizational designs, routines, values, and behavior (Ewing, 2017; Zweifel & Vyas, 2021). For example, in the Wells Fargo scandal, the organization emphasized aggressive sales targets and internal competition, which subsequently fostered widespread fraud, despite the presence of formal ethical codes (Shichor & Heeren, 2021). This wrongdoing was not only tolerated, but also normalized, expected, and even rewarded within the organization (Van Rooij & Fine, 2018). Commentators in the media all agreed something was amiss within the organization, but used different terms to indicate what that was: a “corruption (cross-selling) culture,” ¹ “rotten culture,” ² “cutthroat culture,” ³ “toxic culture,” ⁴ “a culture of greed,” ⁵ “a culture of silence,” ⁶ and a “culture of fear.” ⁷ Such investigations show that many employees participate in or ignore wrongdoing for years. For example, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin marketing – a key driver of the opioid crisis – was a coordinated strategy, not isolated individual misconduct (Keefe, 2021; Meier, 2003). Staff were trained to downplay addiction risks, target high-prescribing doctors, and were rewarded for sales, and concerns were suppressed while compliance was sidelined by a focus on profits.

Such findings underscore that the organizational context can play a key role in organizational misconduct and subsequent harm, and that, crucially, these harms are not anomalies or acts of individual decision-making, but foreseeable outcomes of organizational structures, design, values, and practices. This has led scholars to increasingly redirect analytical attention to the organizational settings in which misconduct is allowed to occur (e.g., Apel & Paternoster, 2009; Campbell & Göritz, 2014; Huisman, 2016; Kramer, 1982; Lord & Levi, 2025). In this perspective, wrongdoing is understood as an outcome of formal organizational systems and informal organizational design and values, which make harmful actions possible, acceptable, or even expected (Hald et al., 2021; Van Rooij & Fine, 2018).

Organizational culture, broadly understood as the shared and transmitted norms, values, and practices that guide behavior, has therefore emerged as a key explanatory concept for understanding widespread, preventable institutional failures (Hald et al., 2021; Schein, 2010). From the standpoint of organizational criminology, this shift from an individual to a collective focus is not surprising. Edwin Sutherland’s (1949) foundational work on white-collar crime emphasized that criminal behavior is learned within the organizational context, where learning processes not only equip organizational members with the tools and knowledge to commit misconduct but also guide them in which behaviors are accepted and expected. Subsequent case studies in organizational criminology have elaborated on these insights; for example, Van De Bunt (2010) examined various cases of financial wrongdoing and argued that workplace cultures that promote a “code of silence” can encourage and sustain unethical behavior among employees. In her examination of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Vaughan (1996) contended that the organizational process of gradually accepting more serious rule violations and hazardous practices played a major role in causing the shuttle’s explosion. From this body of work, a picture emerges of organizations that are more prone to misconduct due to criminogenic processes within them.

Despite recognizing the importance of context, organizational criminology lacks rigorous empirical studies on organizational culture’s link to misconduct (Huisman, 2016; Tobsch & Kluin, 2025). Most research relies on qualitative or post hoc analyses, rarely operationalizing culture in a rigorous or replicable manner (Tobsch & Kluin, 2025). As a result, the field risks overlooking valuable theoretical approaches and measures that could strengthen our understanding of how the organizational context contributes to misconduct and crime. This research gap is notable, given that organizational culture is one of the most extensively studied constructs in management science, organizational psychology, and safety research – fields and disciplines that also study misconduct and wrongdoing (e.g., Greve et al., 2010; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010). These fields offer many concepts and tools, from safety and ethical culture to cultures of pressure or silence, to assess risk-taking and rule-breaking (Guldenmund, 2010; Kaptein, 2008; Roy et al., 2024). Such concepts, and accompanying measures, might offer organizational criminologists potentially accessible and generalizable tools to empirically study how organizational culture relates to harmful and criminologically relevant misconduct.

A key question, however, is to what extent these culture constructs developed in other disciplines are relevant for organizational criminology in a substantive sense. Management research often focuses on behaviors labeled as ‘unethical’, ‘unsafe’, or ‘counterproductive’, which may not always align with definitions of organizational crime in criminology, thereby possibly failing to examine highly deviant and damaging behavior (see e.g., Van Erp & Huisman, 2017). The present paper addresses this question by assessing whether concepts developed in management science to capture the link between organizational culture and misconduct can be used or adapted for criminological research on organizational wrongdoing. Specifically, it examines the extent to which these concepts are empirically associated with criminologically relevant misconduct (defined further below) through an integrative review of the empirical relationship between ethical culture, safety culture, masculinity (contest) culture, and risk culture, and associated misconduct outcomes. In doing so, the study aims to bridge insights from management sciences and organizational criminology and to contribute to a more cumulative and interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of the organizational context on organizational crime. The remainder of this paper first clarifies organizational culture and reviews how misconduct is defined in management science, then examines the empirical evidence linking culture to criminologically relevant misconduct, and closes with implications and future research for integrating management science insights on organizational culture into organizational criminology.

Organizational Culture

Organizational culture has become a central concept for understanding how organizations succeed (Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Peters & Waterman, 1982) and how they fail (Hald et al., 2021, 2024; Van Rooij & Fine, 2018). Emerging prominently in management sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, the concept developed in response to a dissatisfaction with purely formal and rational models of organizational life, with scholars recognizing that organizational outcomes could not be fully explained without attention to this ‘soft side’ of organizations (Alvesson, 2013; Baker, 2002; Pettigrew, 1979). Organizational culture thus offered a framework for explaining why organizations with similar structural and formal attributes, and facing similar market conditions, can behave very differently.

Since its inception, scholars have also seen culture as key to organizational crime and misconduct (Vaughan, 1996), as the concept provides “an explanatory framework for understanding the drivers of behaviour within an organization (…), and explaining how norms and values towards risk (e.g., normalization and tolerance) determine how managers and employees identify and respond to hazards” (Hald et al., 2021, p. 459). Furthermore, culture provides both approval and incentives for rule-breaking, making certain behaviors possible, acceptable, or expected (Apel & Paternoster, 2009; Van Rooij & Fine, 2018).

Schein (2010), who broadly defines the organizational culture as the “shared learning experiences that lead to shared taken-for-granted basic assumptions held by members of the group or organization” (p. 21), conceptualizes it as existing on three interrelated levels. The most visible level consists of artifacts, which are the observable structures, processes, and behaviors, such as organizational architecture, technology, and formal rules. While artifacts are readily observable to anyone, their meaning is often ambiguous to outsiders. The second level of organizational culture consists of espoused beliefs and values, that is, the explicitly articulated principles the organization claims to value that underlie how members should behave. These beliefs serve as a normative function, but may also reflect aspirations or rationalizations rather than the values that actually guide everyday action. For example, an organization might claim that it values safety above all, but if financial goals are routinely prioritized over safety conditions, the value of safety can be seen as more of a goal to strive for than a driver of actual behavior. At the deepest level are the basic underlying assumptions, understood as the unconscious beliefs about organizational reality and appropriate behavior. These assumptions are particularly important because they act as the taken-for-granted foundation that actually shapes everyday practices within the organization (Schein, 2010).

When linked to organizational misconduct, theoretical and empirical work in management sciences has further refined these insights through the development of more specific constructs, including ethical culture, safety culture, risk culture, and masculinity culture, which are all seen as ‘subsets’ of organizational culture and capture how specific norms, values and practices within organizations shape particular forms of misbehavior (e.g., Guldenmund, 2010; Kaptein, 2008; Sheedy et al., 2017; Treviño et al., 1998). These constructs are used to explain patterns of rule violations and unsafe practices across sectors ranging from healthcare to finance, and offer tools for assessing the relationship between organizational culture and large-scale institutional failures (e.g., Hald et al., 2021; Mayer, 2014).

Ethical culture has been one of the most prominent constructs in this literature. Broadly speaking, it refers to the shared norms, values, and practices within an organization that influence how ethical issues are defined, discussed, resolved, or ignored (Roy et al., 2024). This literature further builds on the understanding that unethical conduct results from shared values and expectations, shaped by the interaction between job-related pressures and the collectively held significance of ethics, rather than from individual decision-making (Hald et al., 2021). Influential conceptualizations emphasize that ethical behavior is not only shaped by formal collective elements, such as codes of conduct and ethics training, but also by informal processes, including leadership modeling, peer expectations, and everyday operations within the organization (e.g., Kaptein, 2008; Treviño et al., 1998). From an organizational criminology perspective, ethical culture can thus help explain why misconduct persists even in organizations with extensive formal compliance systems, as well as how unethical behavior can become accepted within an organization when informal processes lack a prioritization of ethically sound decision-making and behavior.

Alongside ethical culture, safety culture is also among the most widely used cultural concepts for understanding organizational misconduct (Mayer, 2014). The concept of safety culture focuses on norms and practices related, predictably, to safety in organizations, for employees, customers, product users, and patients (Guldenmund, 2010). The term gained prominence following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, when an investigative report into the fallout used the term to explain how informal organizational conditions contributed to the catastrophic failure (Fleming et al., 2018). Subsequent work framed safety culture as the product of shared values, attitudes, competencies, and decisions that shape how organizations manage health and safety risk, and applied it to explain misconduct and institutional failures in a wide range of (high-risk) sectors, such as aviation, construction, and healthcare (Bisbey et al., 2021). For organizational criminology, safety culture can be relevant because work in this domain shows how tolerance of shortcuts, normalization of deviance, and reluctance to report incidents can create the organizational context in which misconduct becomes routine, which in turn can lead to conditions that enable the possibilities of great harm (as occurred in the crash of two Boeing planes; see, for example, Zweifel & Vyas, 2021).

The notion of risk culture further narrows the focus to how organizations define and respond to risk (Cimini, 2021). It captures the shared assumptions about acceptable risk-taking and the relative importance of risk management, with some approaches emphasizing managerial perceptions (e.g., Bozeman & Kingsley, 1998), while others focus on employees’ views of how seriously risk management is taken and prioritized in everyday organizational life (e.g., Ghafoori et al., 2023). Although the concept has been applied in both public and private organizations, it has been particularly influential in studies of financial institutions (Cimini, 2021). As such, risk culture can be relevant to organizational criminology for explaining how excessive risk-taking and financial misconduct can be culturally embedded and rewarded within an organization.

Finally, scholars have used research on toxic masculinity and gendered organizational dynamics to explain environments in which individuals are pressured to constantly demonstrate toughness, dominance, and competitiveness, conceptualized as masculinity (contest) culture (Berdahl et al., 2018). Berdahl and colleagues (2018) describe such cultures as workplaces where success is equated with assertiveness, risk-taking, and individual achievement, while vulnerability and cooperation are devalued. In such environments, ethical concerns or safety warnings might be dismissed as signs of weakness or personal failures. In organizational criminology, this concept might be used to understand gendered and race-based misconduct, such as sexual intimidation and racism.

In sum, the four concepts discussed – ethical culture, safety culture, risk culture, and masculinity contest culture – exemplify how organizational culture might shape misconduct across sectors. These constructs offer empirical tools for assessing misbehavior and can be highly relevant for organizational criminology, provided they are connected to behaviors central to the discipline. To evaluate the relevance of these concepts for criminology, we now turn to defining organizational misconduct as used in management sciences, outline its dimensions, identify those pertinent to criminology, and then analyze empirical evidence linking these culture constructs to criminologically significant organizational misconduct.

Criminologically Relevant Organizational Misconduct

In management science, where these constructs have been developed and examined, crime is not the core focus of study; as a result, the organizational culture concepts assessed in this paper were never developed to capture criminal behavior directly. Instead, these concepts study different forms of organizational misconduct. While not always criminal, those studied behaviors can be criminologically relevant when they are highly deviant or harmful. Van Erp and Huisman (2017) describe corporate or organizational crime as “illegal or harmful acts, committed by legitimate organizations or their members, primarily for the benefit of these organizations” (p. 248). Van Erp (2018) notes that this understanding aligns closely with Greve et al.’s (2010, p. 56) definition of organizational misconduct as “behavior in or by an organization that a social-control agent judges to transgress a line separating right from wrong; where such a line can separate legal, ethical, and socially responsible behavior from their antitheses.”

Organizational misconduct spans disciplines and lacks a single definition (MacLean, 2008). Wrongful behavior can be judged by legal, ethical, or social standards (Palmer, 2012). Some definitions are broad and include minor unethical acts, such as not holding the elevator or coming in late, while others limit misconduct to violations of laws or even just criminal law (Baucus & Dworkin, 1991; Clinard et al., 1979; Szwajkowski, 1985). As a result of these different views on what constitutes misconduct in the workplace, considerable variance also exists in the way it is operationalized. A widely-used framework is organizational deviance, or deviant workplace behaviors or employee deviance (Hershcovis & Barling, 2009; Lian et al., 2014), described by Robinson and Bennett (1995, p. 556) as ‘voluntary behavior that violates organizational norms and in doing so threatens the well-being of an organization, its members, or both’. They categorize deviance by intent and severity, identifying four types: minor production deviance and serious property deviance (both aimed at the organization), and minor political deviance and serious personal aggression (both interpersonal). In another widely used model, Vardi and Wiener (1996, p. 153) define organizational misbehavior as intentional actions violating norms or societal values. They categorize misbehavior by intent: type S benefits the self, type O benefits the organization, and type D is destructive. This model focuses on intent, not specific actions or severity. Conversely, Lefkowitz’s model (2006) prioritizes severity over intent. He distinguishes between incivility (rude acts), unethical behavior (failures to act rightly), and organizational misbehavior (the most severe, from theft to embezzlement). These categories can overlap, and distinctions are sometimes unclear.

These frameworks show that organizational misconduct is broadly conceptualized as behavior that can violate societal and organizational norms and rules as well as formal laws, and is assessed primarily in terms of severity and intent. We can draw two observations from this overview of organizational misconduct in management sciences regarding the criminological relevance of these behaviors. First, management science and criminology seem to deal with the dimension of intent differently. Management science focuses exclusively on the intended target or beneficiary and less on the intentionality of the behaviors. However, intentionality is clearly relevant for criminology, as higher intention can signal greater (criminal) liability and accountability. Unintentional acts can also matter criminologically, if possible consequences are severe. Consider, for example, unsafe behaviors, which go against formal rules and regulations and can lead to very severe consequences, yet are not always intentional or intended to benefit or harm, but are oftentimes simply a result of employees being uninformed (Neal & Griffin, 2002; Vinodkumar & Bhasi, 2010). Thus, intent should be separated into the intended target and the degree of intentionality.

Second, management science definitions of misconduct rarely consider impact (at times, it is even explicitly left out of the equation, like in Vardi & Wiener’s model (1996)). In contrast, the level of harm is vital within criminology, as it can increase criminal seriousness and raise questions about victimization (Dodge, 2020; Whyte, 2007). Thus, from a criminological standpoint, organizational misconduct must also be understood in terms of possible negative impact. Harm may be financial, bodily, ecological, emotional, or reputational. Both internal and external parties are often affected, and one act can cause multiple harms.

In summary, four dimensions determine the criminological relevance of organizational misconduct: deviance, intentionality, intended target, and impact. Greater deviance and impact increase relevance, while the intentionality and intended target provides important information about the (lack of) a target of the behavior. Although the empirical studies reviewed here (see below) rarely frame their outcomes in (legal) criminological terms, the behaviors they study – including workplace bullying, counterproductive work behavior, and unsafe acts – can be highly deviant, intentional or negligent, directed at identifiable targets, and consequential in their impact, and can thus fall within the scope of organizational crime as defined in the literature (Pohlmann, 2023; Schrager & Short, 1978; Van Erp & Huisman, 2017), depending on how strongly the studied behavior expresses each dimension. Using these categories, we now turn to an assessment of whether criminologists might benefit from concepts used in management science.

Literature Search and Analysis

To assess how the four organizational culture constructs are empirically associated with criminologically relevant misconduct, we conducted a review of the relevant empirical literature. The review is integrative in purpose and semi-systematic in method: integrative in the sense that its central aim is conceptual, mapping empirical findings from various data sources and methods across management science, organizational psychology, and safety research to evaluate their relevance for organizational criminology (Torraco, 2005; Whittemore & Knafl, 2005), and semi-systematic in the sense that we applied search strings, pre-specified eligibility criteria and a structured coding procedure while retaining the flexibility needed to draw together work conceptualized differently across research fields (Snyder, 2019). Our search emerged from a broader project on survey-based measurement of organizational culture, in which reviews, validated survey instruments, and empirical studies of behavioral outputs were identified in parallel according to the search strings and eligibility criteria outlined below. When articles initially located for one purpose (e.g., a survey-validation paper) also reported relevant findings on construct-misconduct associations, those findings were retained for the present analysis. Consistent with an integrative review approach (Whittemore & Knafl, 2005), we therefore report inclusion criteria and the final set of included sources rather than stage-by-stage screening counts characteristic of for example systematic reviews.

We searched the academic databases Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar in the spring of 2023 (with no date restrictions), prioritizing review articles (systematic, narrative, and meta-analysis) on the empirical relationship between each construct and organizational misconduct. Search strings thus combined synonyms for construct, misconduct, and review terms, following the same template across constructs: for example, for masculinity contest culture, we used: ((“masculinity culture” OR “masculine culture” OR “contest culture” OR “masculinity contest culture”) AND (“misconduct” OR “deviance” OR “crime” OR “wrongdoing” OR “counterproductive” OR “misbehavior”) AND (“review” OR “systematic review” OR “narrative review” OR “meta-analysis” OR “meta analysis”)). Where reviews were limited or absent, we supplemented the search with the most-cited empirical articles linking the construct to misconduct, screening approximately the first fifty results per construct (the first five pages of database output, sorted by citations high-low). To screen for eligibility, we applied six criteria, set prior to the search: (1) only peer-reviewed work was included, excluding, for example, student papers and dissertations; (2) the article had to have been published in English; (3) one of the four culture constructs had to be mentioned in title, abstract, or keywords; (4) the article had to study the link between one of the constructs and misconduct, excluding studies of ‘organizational’, ‘corporate’, or ‘workplace’ culture in the general sense; (5) the article had to study culture specifically, excluding studies of climate; and (6) the article had to be focused on the workplace context, excluding work on the same construct in the non-organizational domain (e.g., masculine national culture; Hofstede, 2001). Of the articles that were deemed fit for full-text screening, but not for inclusion in the final review, most were excluded because they did not report on the empirical relationship between the culture construct and behavior. This process yielded 16 reviews and empirical articles included in our assessment of the empirical relationship between the culture constructs and different forms of organizational misconduct (see Table 1). The full set of included articles and behaviors, organized by construct, is presented in Appendix A.

Table 1.

Dimensions of Misconduct and Their Relationship With Organizational Culture Per Construct

	Association	Deviance	Intentionality	Intention	Impact
Ethical culture	Negative	Mixed	Unclear	Mixed	Unclear
Safety culture	Negative	Mixed	Unclear	Unclear	High impact
Risk culture	Mediating (mixed)	Mixed	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear
Masculinity culture	Positive	Highly unethical/illegal	Unclear	Damaging to others	Unclear
				Self-benefit

The search and screening at abstract and full-text stages was carried out by the lead author. The first, second and third author then independently coded all included articles along the four dimensions of criminologically relevant misconduct developed above: deviance, intentionality, intended target, and impact. Coding followed a deductive approach (Linneberg & Korsgaard, 2019; Miles et al., 2014), with the four dimensions and their definitions as described above serving as the a priori coding framework. ⁸ Because most reviewed articles do not explicitly discuss these dimensions, coders frequently inferred dimension values from descriptions of outcome measures, survey items, and reported findings. As such, when direct coding was not possible, coders flagged the item as ‘unclear’ rather than imposing a forced classification. Codes were compared in bi-weekly meetings with the full research team, where disagreements and ambiguous cases were resolved until consensus was reached. Initial agreement between coders was high, with most disagreements concerning the impact and intentionality dimensions, which most often required inferential coding.

Does Organizational Culture Predict Criminologically Relevant Misconduct?

Although the constructs were selected because they were conceptualized to relate to organizational misbehavior, much of the management science literature links the constructs to other organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, communication, engagement, motivation, and well-being (e.g., Roy et al., 2024, for ethical culture; Arzahan et al., 2022, for safety culture). Several studies did not directly assess behavioral outcomes, but rather aspects that might indirectly relate to behavior such as intentions, attitudes, and potential decision-making. These variables are related but not equivalent to behavior. For example, studying intentions to call an ethics hotline (Kaptein, 2011) might predict whether the members of the organization would want to, or feel like they should, call an ethics hotline, but does not assess whether organizational members actually do or have done so. Furthermore, safety culture has primarily been linked to accidents (see e.g., Clarke, 2000). While this relationship is valuable when looking at the major harmful consequences organizational culture can have, it provides limited insights into the behaviors that led to those accidents.

Articles that measured the relationship between the culture constructs and misconduct did so using multiple survey item questions to capture different conceptualizations of misconduct. Examples of such concepts include harassment (Workman-Stark, 2021) and negative risk behavior (Sheedy & Griffin, 2017). Many of the studies we reviewed included broad umbrella concepts like ‘unethical behavior’ (Kaptein, 2011; Tanner et al., 2019; Treviño et al., 2014) or ‘negative risk behavior’ (Sheedy & Griffin, 2017), without specifying which concrete behaviors were included under these labels. For example, Sheedy and Griffin (2017) assess how their concept of risk is associated with what they term ‘undesirable risk behavior’ and ‘observed negative risk behavior,’ measured with three and two items respectively. However, they do not provide the exact wording of these survey questions, leaving the behaviors included in this outcome category unclear.

Surveys that did publish the questions used to assess misconduct often included a broad range of behaviors, ranging from relatively minor transgressions to outright criminal activities. For example, in studying how masculinity contest cultures cause hostile interpersonal conduct in policing organizations, Workman-Stark (2021) used the Negative Acts Questionnaire (Hoel et al., 2001), which ranges from minor (‘having your opinions and views ignored’) to quite severe (‘threats of violence or physical abuse or actual abuse’) forms of bullying. Some of the survey questions assessing misconduct outcomes used highly ambiguous terms, such as ‘unethical behavior,’ or ‘risky behavior’, leaving the interpretation of what counts as unethical or risky to the respondent.

Together, the use of non-behavioral proxies, undisclosed survey items, undefined umbrella terms, and outcomes spanning wide ranges of severity into one scale, challenge a clear assessment of how the culture constructs predict misconduct, and more specifically, of the extent to which the measures of organizational culture can predict criminologically relevant forms of misconduct. Assessing non-behavioral aspects, such as intentions and attitudes, and broad umbrella terms, such as those that are assessed on a wide spectrum of behaviors, complicates our ability to understand exactly what outcomes are studied, and what behaviors the culture constructs empirically predict.

Within the confines of these challenges, we coded relevant outcome measures (leaving aside clearly non-behavioral outcomes) on the four dimensions of misconduct as well as the empirical association between the concept and the misconduct. The results in Table 1 reflect consensus coding for each construct across its associated outcome measures; Appendix A presents the underlying coding and reasoning for each individual outcome measure, organized by construct.

Table 1 summarizes what the reviewed studies report about the overall association found between the measure of organizational culture and organizational misconduct. The articles included in our review provide empirical evidence of an association between each of the selected organizational culture constructs and organizational misconduct: two of the constructs show a negative relationship, concerning positive aspects of a culture (ethicality and safety), one of the constructs shows a positive relation, capturing negative aspects of a culture (masculinity contest cultures), and one construct shows mixed mediating results (depending on the included dimension, risk culture mediated the relationship between risk structures and studied behavior; Sheedy & Griffin, 2017). These empirical findings thus confirm that the four constructs are associated with organizational misconduct, consistent with expectations.

We should note, however, that there may be issues of self-report bias (Donaldson & Grant-Vallone, 2002), negativity bias, and fundamental attribution (Berry & Frederickson, 2015; Rozin & Royzman, 2001). While there are ways to address such issues, for instance through other-referential questions (Rorie, 2022), the use of vignettes in factorial surveys (Rorie, 2022), or by reducing the risk of connecting data to respondents (Elffers et al., 1992; Hessing et al., 1988), these issues will remain especially challenging and problematic for the assessment of deviant, illegal, and highly harmful behavior (Van Rooij & Rorie, 2021).

As a next step in our analysis, we sought to understand how the four constructs have been linked to criminologically relevant organizational misconduct. The results of our analysis are reflected in the latter four columns of Table 1. First, some of the reviewed studies did include outcome measures that covered aspects that were clearly deviant or illegal. Examples include harassment (Glick et al., 2018; Workman-Stark, 2021) corruption (Mayer, 2014), and personal aggression (Appelbaum et al., 2005). Other outcome measures did not involve clearly illegal behavior, or were just too broad or mixed in nature to assess the level of deviance involved. Examples here include institutional failures (Hald et al., 2021), unethical choices (Kaptein, 2011; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010) and negative risk behavior (Sheedy & Griffin, 2017).

The intentionality of the misconduct was not measured directly. This leaves it generally unclear whether the misconduct happened intentionally or not. We may theoretically deduce, to a limited extent, from the types of behaviors that were assessed whether there is a likelihood that such conduct can be intentional. Particular behaviors that were assessed, such as bullying, harassment, or corruption, may often have some conscious intentionality, although even in our analysis here, this is not always certain. Outcome measures that assessed different forms of deviance, such as political, property, and production deviance, are assumed in the original theorization to be intentional (Robinson & Bennett, 1995); however, we cannot be sure the reviewed behaviors capture such intentionality with the broadly worded terms and questions they include (Appelbaum et al., 2005; Kish-Gephart et al., 2010). For other outcome measures assessed here, such as institutional failures, negative risk behavior, or unsafe behaviors, intentionality remains unclear.

Few of the reviewed papers explicitly operationalized whether the misconduct they studied was intended to benefit or harm the organization, or the individual organizational member involved. In assessing the intended beneficial target of the misconduct, we thus had to infer the intended target from the type of misconduct at hand and the particular questions asked. Here we see that the Masculinity Contest Culture Scale, which targets different forms of harassment in the workplace, is the clearest in terms of analyzing intention, as behavior such as sexual harassment, bullying and personal aggression (Glick et al., 2018) will most often intend to damage individuals within the organization, and/or intend to benefit those that engage in them. There can be instances where extreme pressure, which can result in bullying, general harassment, and threats of aggression towards co-workers, may also occur to benefit the organization, for instance to force workers to meet targets. For other outcome measures, such as institutional failures, corruption, unethical behavior, production deviance, negative risk behavior, and unsafe behavior, it is mostly unclear who, if anyone, benefits or is harmed.

Finally, we assessed to what extent the constructs can help to predict highly impactful, harmful misconduct. We found several outcome measures that clearly involve (potentially) highly harmful conduct. These include corruption (Mayer, 2014) and harassment (Glick et al., 2018; Workman-Stark, 2021). Furthermore, Hald and colleagues (2021) looked at institutional failures, which they argued may have large impacts, for instance major financial fraud, oil and gas spills, and nuclear disasters. However, most other outcome measures did not explicitly assess misconduct with clear damaging impact. We either saw that behavior with minor or unclear damaging impact was assessed, or that broad, umbrella concepts of misconduct were used and measured through questions that covered a wide range of misconduct, varying from minor to potentially major impact. For example, Treviño and colleagues (1998) studied the umbrella outcome concept of ‘unethical behavior’, using a 20-item survey adapted from Akaah (1992). This instrument covers seemingly milder misconduct, ranging from ‘concealing one’s error’ to ‘authorizing a subordinate to violate company rules’ (p. 605). Kaptein (2011) similarly studied the relationship between ethical culture and the umbrella concept ‘unethical behavior’. His survey assessed such unethical behavior using a 37-item scale, ranging from ‘doing business with disreputable suppliers’ to ‘violating international labor or human rights’ (p. 609). This shows how most outcome measures did not directly encapsulate high impact misconduct, but did incorporate aspects that could potentially be components of such impactful occurrences. Here, it is also noteworthy that the studies we reviewed seldom look at the larger impact the immediate organizational misconduct may have on causing broader systemic harms, such as the impact that fraudulent and high-risk behaviors during the 2008 global financial crisis had on the global financial and economic systems (Claessens & Van Horen, 2015; Lewis, 2010; Otker-Robe & Podpiera, 2013).

To summarize, our findings suggest that the outcome measures used to assess how the constructs of organizational culture are associated with misconduct did not clearly indicate highly deviant, intentional, and impactful organizational wrongdoing. These results indicate that much remains unclear and mixed regarding the outcome measures used to assess the relationship between the organizational culture construct and the type of misconduct supposedly associated with it. Regarding deviance of misconduct, the results are mixed for ethical culture, risk culture, and safety culture. Furthermore, all constructs lack clarity about whether the misbehavior they assess is intentional. Risk culture and safety culture are unclear about whether the behavior benefits or harms the actor engaged in it or the organization. And most importantly for our purposes here – namely to assess whether the organizational culture constructs can predict highly damaging behavior – masculinity contest culture, ethical culture, and risk culture do not clearly assess outcomes with highly impactful damages.

The reviewed empirical studies demonstrate, on the one hand, an (indirect) association between the four selected constructs of organizational culture and organizational misconduct. On the other hand, the existing empirical work largely does not establish a clear association between the culture constructs and criminologically relevant misconduct. As such, it is insufficiently clear whether organizations that score high on masculinity contest culture, or low on ethical culture, safety culture, or risk culture, are more likely to cause the type of misconduct that is relevant for criminologists.

Discussion

The present study set out from the premise that organizational culture matters greatly for understanding organizational misconduct. Regulators, compliance professionals, and investigative journalism routinely invoke cultural explanations when seeking to diagnose large-scale organizational failures, while scholars across management science, organizational psychology, and safety research have produced an extensive body of literature linking organizational culture to unethical, unsafe, and rule-breaking behavior, among others. Yet, despite this broad consensus, organizational criminology has not systematically incorporated organizational culture as a central concept of study. Cultural explanations are frequently invoked in criminological accounts of organizational scandals, but the concept of organizational culture remains under-theorized and under-measured. Against this backdrop, the present paper sought closer engagement with the concept by reviewing the empirical evidence on the relationship between organizational culture constructs developed in management science and criminologically relevant forms of organizational misconduct. While further research is necessary to quantify effect sizes across studies, this integrative review captured the overall direction of the empirical literature, allowing us to assess what these culture constructs have, and have not, been shown to predict on a general level.

The review yielded a mixed and, ultimately, sobering picture. On the one hand, there is clear evidence that the concepts are associated with various forms of organizational misconduct as operationalized in management research. At the same time, however, the review highlights limitations regarding the relevance of these empirical outcomes for organizational criminology. The organizational culture constructs analyzed here have not been clearly or consistently associated with forms of misconduct that are unambiguously criminologically relevant, meaning misconduct that is more deviant, intentional, and harmful. In many cases, the outcomes studied in the literature remain at the level of attitudinal measures, hypothetical scenarios, or relatively low-level rule infractions. As a result, it remains unclear whether higher scores on ethical culture, safety culture, or related constructs are meaningfully associated with, let alone predictive of, an increased or decreased risk of serious organizational misconduct. In short, while these concepts capture important intentions and behaviors, the current state of empirical evidence does not allow us to conclude that they can be used to assess criminologically relevant organizational misconduct in a meaningful way.

We do not believe this gap should be interpreted as a failure of organizational culture research, or that the concepts reviewed here are not relevant for organizational criminology. As we have highlighted in the introduction, larger-scale organizational scandals did include gross forms of misconduct on a wider scale; behaviors that are not currently studied in management sciences, but have far-reaching consequences. Rather, the lack of examination of more severe forms of misconduct is a clear indication of a misalignment between disciplinary priorities, and a reflection of differences in outcome selection. Management science has primarily been concerned with improving organizational functioning, of which misbehavior is only one component. Consequently, the empirical focus here has often been on behaviors that are proximate to control and that are changeable by management. In contrast, organizational criminology focuses on more severe and impactful forms of misconduct, and as such, the field is especially well-equipped to study these outcomes.

This presents a significant opportunity for organizational criminology. By leveraging their expertise in identifying and interpreting serious organizational wrongdoing, criminologists can make a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary empirical study of organizational culture and, in doing so, they can also provide valuable feedback to other organizational fields by testing whether widely used culture constructs merely relate to ‘smaller’ forms of misconduct, or also those that produce substantial harm. Naturally, we believe a critical first step in this process is to understand whether current empirical associations hold up for other forms of organizational misconduct as well. Studies should include outcome measures that directly assess how the conceptualization of organizational culture is related to more deviant, intentional and impactful forms of organizational misconduct – that is, more criminologically relevant organizational misconduct. For example, risk culture and ethical culture can be tested further for a relationship with fraud, whereas safety culture, risk culture and ethical culture can be tested for a relationship with environmental and regulatory crime, and masculinity contest culture can be linked to race- and gender-based violence in and outside of the workplace.

In doing so, criminologists can also draw on their tradition of in-depth, qualitative case studies to examine the link between organizational culture and misconduct. Management science has predominantly relied on scalable, generalizable quantitative measures of organizational culture, which is an approach that might work well when controlling and managing an organization, but is less suited to capture the processes through which culture relates to serious misconduct. Conversely, case studies allow for a richer, deeper, and more valid understanding of both organizational culture, as well as its link with different forms of (criminologically relevant) organizational misconduct. Recent advances in qualitative analysis methods allow for better causal analysis within cases (Beach & Pedersen, 2019; Beach & Rohlfing, 2018; Bennett, 2010) and comparison across cases (Rihoux & Ragin, 2009; Schneider & Rohlfing, 2013; Schneider & Wagemann, 2010). Combining insights from surveys with such case studies allows for a better-grounded operationalization of such surveys, better generalization of such case studies through surveys, and deeper analysis of findings found in surveys through follow up case studies to come to a more integrated and holistic understanding of how organizational culture can lead to highly impactful misconduct.

This paper has argued that organizational culture deserves a more central and theoretically, as well as empirically grounded, role in organizational criminology. The challenge is not to demonstrate whether culture matters in influencing misbehavior, as this is already widely accepted by scholars, regulators, and the media, but to specify how, when, and under what conditions organizational culture contributes to organizational wrongdoing. Tackling this issue will require continued dialogue between organizational criminology and other disciplines that study culture, different outcome measures, and methodological approaches that are capable of capturing the complex processes between culture and harm.