Repairing Trust in an Organization after Integrity Violations: The Ambivalence of Organizational Rule Adjustments

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

This paper investigates how an organization attempts to repair trust after organizational-level integrity violations by examining the influence of organizational rules on trust repair. We reconstruct the prominent corruption case of Siemens AG, which has faced the greatest bribery scandal in the history of German business. Our findings suggest that tightening organizational rules is an appropriate signal of trustworthiness for external stakeholders to demonstrate that the organization seriously intends to prevent integrity violations in the future. However, such rule adjustments were the source of dissatisfaction among employees since the new rules were difficult to implement in practice. We argue that these different impacts of organizational rules result from their inherent paradoxical nature. To address this problem, we suggest managing an effective interplay between formal and informal rules.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1205-1235
Number of pages31
JournalOrganization studies
Volume36
Issue number9
Publication statusPublished - 24 Sept 2015
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

Keywords

  • corruption, organizational integrity, organizational rules, trust repair