The Social Dynamics of Organizational Misconduct

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Organizations structure our lives. We work at companies, we send our kids to schools, we receive healthcare in hospitals. So, when they cause harm, it can have devastating impacts on our lives and communities.

There’s a lot we don’t understand about why organizations, and the people in them, engage in unethical behaviours. But recent research from professors at the Desautels Faculty of Management reveals social dynamics as an important piece of the puzzle.

Social dynamics are how networks of individuals organize and influence each others’ behaviours. Every person is part of at least one group of peers, and each group has its own norms and values – explicit or implicit rules about how members should behave. These rules influence what’s considered “good” and “bad” behaviour in those contexts.

“What you consider deviant in one community may not be considered deviant in another,” said Amandine Ody-Brasier, Associate Professor in Organizational Behaviour, in a Delve podcast interview. “It is in the eye of the beholder.”

And across communities, you’ll find variances on what’s considered acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, she explained. Smoking may be acceptable among your friends, but lighting a cigarette around your parents will likely provoke a very different reaction.

Electronic Dance Misconduct

Social dynamics can heavily influence individual behaviour, sometimes even more so than the law itself. Professor Ody-Brasier documented this phenomenon among Electronic Dance Music (EDM) DJs and the practice of music sampling.

In music, sampling refers to when a DJ uses an existing recording in their own musical work. This is a relatively common practice in many new and popular musical genres, including EDM.

Generally, when sampling a song, you must acquire permission from the original copyright holder. They can refuse, accept, or accept with some stipulations. If they refuse, and you sample their work anyway, you could be liable for copyright infringement.

Unapproved music sampling, in this case, is illegal. It’s a type of misconduct in the eyes of the law. But, as Professor Ody-Brasier discovered  , DJs in the EDM community run by a slightly different set of rules. For the most part, illegal sampling from a prominent DJ is met with condemnation and sometimes ostracization. The community makes an exception, however, for new artists.

DJs at the beginning of their careers may not have the clout or know-how to acquire the right permissions to sample a track, explained Professor Ody-Brasier. So, the community turns a blind eye. The social dynamics here deem “using copyrighted material without permission” as acceptable behaviour for new DJs but not for more established artists.

“It’s a labeling story,” said Professor Ody-Brasier. “We’re talking about the exact same behaviours, but they’re going to be labeled differently.”

Pockets of Misconduct

Professor Ody-Brasier’s work on misconduct in the EDM community speaks to the influence of social dynamics on behaviour. They shape what’s considered “good” and “bad” behaviour and can sometimes enable egregious acts with severe consequences.

The Chicago Police Department, for example, is one of the largest in the United States. Misconduct in this environment includes use of excessive force and making false arrests, transgressions with devastating effects that range from life-altering to lethal.

found that severe misconduct in the Chicago PD usually occurs among clusters of individuals – small groups of officers who are aware of each other’s problematic behaviours and enable them. Each of these groups has its own rules, norms, and hierarchies, separate from the structure of the wider police department, that protect and enable problematic behaviours.

When misconduct sprouts in an organization, identifying and punishing bad behaviour is not always enough to treat it, said Professor Gordon in a Delve interview. This is especially true if misconduct is already widespread and seen as a normal part of day-to-day operations.

If punishment isn’t best tool for deterring bad behaviour, where does that leave us?

Building Your Own Toolbox

Diana Dakhlallah  is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Desautels Faculty of Management. In a recent study, she tests a framework for addressing the root causes of misconduct in an institution. In her case, she sought to address bribery in Moroccan maternity care wards.

The first step is to drill down to the organizational level. Even within networks of organizations, such as a healthcare system, the prevalence of misconduct can vary from one hospital to the next. And at an even more granular level, misconduct can vary by ward, explained Professor Dakhlallah in a Delve interview . In her case, she found that bribery was more prevalent among maternity care ward workers than other wards.

The next step is to understand why the misconduct is occurring. Professor Dakhlallah found a few reasons maternity care workers might be accepting bribes. Among them were pay disparities and porous job boundaries. She also found that, even though many maternity care workers engaged in bribery, they knew it was unethical and engaged in it anyway.

Armed with this information, Professor Dakhlallah moved on to step three: design and test a solution. In this case, she leveraged social dynamics and social accountability to address bribery in Moroccan maternity wards. And it worked, to an extent.

Professor Dakhlallah created a scenario in which offending wards would face a credible visibility threat. Their colleagues across the hospital would soon find out exactly how frequently bribery occurred within their ward.

For the most part, the threat worked. The wards with the highest rates of bribery dramatically cut back. But wards with already low instances of bribery barely changed at all.  Professor Dakhlallah suspects this is because bribery is acceptable in the wards up to a certain threshold, at which point discomfort settles in again.

Leveraging social dynamics proved effective for reducing bribery but fell short of eradicating the behaviour.  Professor Dakhlallah suggested other possible remedies, such as increasing pay or restructuring job responsibilities, which could address some the other variables at play in this context.

No Silver Bullet

There’s still a lot we don’t know about how misconduct works and how to address it. But based on research by Professors Dakhlallah, Gordon, and Ody-Brasier, social dynamics are a fundamental piece of the puzzle. New DJs can illegally sample copyrighted music thanks to the support of their community. Police officers are organized in mini social hierarchies that enable their misconduct. And Professor Dakhlallah’s work challenges us to understand the root causes of bad behaviour, which can include social dynamics. And we can use this information to develop and test solutions to misconduct across organizations.