Bribery is more likely to occur when public organizations don’t treat their workers equitably, according to recent research by Diana Dakhlallah, assistant professor in Organizational Behaviour at McGill University, and Katie McIntosh, PhD student in Organizational Behaviour at McGill University.
Dakhlallah links this phenomenon to organizational design and task allocation. In particular, work task allocation (how work is organised) and relative pay (how work is compensated) — two core aspects of workers’ lives. There’s a threshold of additional responsibilities that workers will accept before they feel they are being treated unfairly—especially if those tasks are typically handled by colleagues higher up the pay scale.
“You can induce inequity or unfairness in the way people are compensated, by virtue of the way work is organized,” she said.
Dakhlallah and McIntosh’s findings give managers a new lever with which to address corruption in public institutions. If bribery occurs because of perceived unfair management practices, then it can be reversed by addressing that sense of unfairness.
The paper is a continuation of Dakhlallah’s previous work on bribery in Moroccan maternity wards. She identified where and how bribery tends to occur, and discovered how much it can vary from one environment to the next. One hospital might have several reports of bribery, while another does not. And at a more granular level, bribery can occur in one ward but not another – even if they’re within the same building.
Public organizations follow a rigid and transparent pay grid, so compensation only partially explains the variance in bribery.
“There was something that seemed fundamentally different about the organization of work,” said Dakhlallah.
This became the focus of her latest paper. As she discovered, the organization of work is also central to the story.
Corrective measures
Dakhlallah and McIntosh’s first task was to choose a study design – a challenge in itself, when dealing with complex health environments, let alone corruption. How do you independently manipulate variables like task allocation and salaries? It’s not exactly ethical to reduce a nurse’s pay or assign them doctor tasks, just to see how they react. Then there’s the matter of isolating each effect: how do we know nurses accepted bribes because of work overlap, and not some other variable we didn’t account for? And to the extent that some variables interact with each other, how do we account for their effects, too? Dakhlallah and McIntosh had to address all of these concerns, while bypassing the challenge of speaking to workers directly. Not many people would be comfortable admitting to accepting bribes, even with the promise of anonymity.
Dakhlallah and McIntosh settled on a conjoint survey experiment. They created a group of hypothetical nurse profiles, which mirrored the characteristics of real-life nurses. Each profile had some degree of task overlap with hypothetical doctor colleagues. They had varying degrees of wage inequality compared to their doctor coworkers. They also had varying years of experience and professional development opportunities available to them.
Then, our researchers asked real-life nurses and doctors from India to complete a survey. They were to choose which nurse profiles they thought were more likely to accept bribes.
The results showed that higher degrees of work overlap and wage inequality increased the perceived likelihood that nurses would accept bribes from patients.
These findings suggest that bribery appears to serve as a corrective measure for inequitable combinations of task distribution and compensation between coworkers, said Dakhlallah. When nurses perform the same tasks as higher-paid doctors but don’t see a commensurate rise in compensation, bribery can fill the gap.
But the relationship between these variables wasn’t linear—some degree of work overlap was acceptable without an equivalent pay increase and without turning to bribery. But beyond a certain point, that stopped being true.
“Pay difference is okay at a certain level of work overlap, but then it stops being okay at another level,” said Dakhlallah.
(Un)acceptable thresholds
There are many reasons why a nurse might perform more complex tasks beyond their job description. The biggest one is staffing shortages, said Dakhlallah. The World Health Organization projects a shortfall of 11 million health workers, mostly in low- and middle-income countries.
In such conditions, it’s all hands on deck: to meet the needs of patients, some staff will have to take on extra responsibilities. Nurses may be asked to renew prescriptions or perform complex procedures – tasks typically handled by doctors. And in environments as dynamic and fast-paced as healthcare, this task allocation can happen suddenly or incrementally.
When this happens, bribery doesn’t enter the equation right away. Nurses commonly accept new tasks to gain skills and progress in their careers.
“There’s a lot of things potentially positive about this,” said Dakhlallah. “It’s in effect upskilling.”
Especially in middle-to-lower income countries, public sector jobs are among the most stable and well-paid. So, there’s some incentive to climb the organizational ladder through upskilling, and less incentive to leave if they feel unfairly treated.
But when things do start to feel unfair, that’s when workers seem to be at risk of turning to bribery, said Dakhlallah. It can happen when the increased responsibility doesn’t come with appropriately adjusted pay — so workers accept bribes to fill the pay gap. It might also happen when the increased responsibility does not translate to better career opportunities.
For Dakhlallah, these findings give managers new levers with which to address corruption in public organizations. If bribery occurs when there’s a sense of unfairness among workers, managers can look into addressing that unfairness. That could mean compensating workers according to the complexity of their tasks, reallocating work, or a combination of both. It could also mean creating professional development programs that better support workers’ careers.
“These are design issues,” said Dakhlallah.
Each situation will be different. But managers can start by investigating the root causes of bribery in their organizations. Then they can tailor a solution accordingly.
“You can start figuring out how to put these pieces together in a way that makes sense for the local realities of a workplace,” said Dakhlallah.
This article was written by Eric Dicaire, managing editor at Delve. Inspired by the research paper, “How Task Allocations and Wage Inequality Shape Workplace Bribery” by Diana Dakhllalah and Katie McIntosh.
